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"Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and show John again 
those things which ye do hear and see : the hlind receive their 
sight, and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf 
hear; the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel 
preached to them. And blessed is he whosoever shall not be 
offended in me."— Matthew and Luke. 



TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 



CHRISTIANITY. 



PETER BAYNE, A.M. 

AUTHOE OF "THE CHRISTIAN LIFE," "ESSAYS IN BIOGKAPHY AXD 
CKITICIS3I," ETC. 



BOSTON: 
GOULD AND LINCOLN, 

59 WASHINGTON STREET. 

NEW YORK: SHELDON AND COMPANY. 

CINCINNATI : GEORGE S. BLANCHARD. 

18 6 2. 






GEO. C. RASD & AVERY, 
8TEEE0TYPEES AND PRINTERS. 



LC Control Number 



tmp96 027055 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



It is with a melancholy perception of its 
defects that I offer this little book to the 
world. In elaborating a subject so profound 
in interest, so transcendent in importance, 
so glorious in general character, the toil of 
years would have been worthily expended, 
and the severest intellectual labor would 
have been but more intense enjoyment. I 
have been able to devote to its composition 
only those hours which I could snatch from 
the occupations of an absorbing profession. 
To think and write down the argument at 



XIV PREFATORY NOTE. 

first hand, with hardly a glance at the lit- 
erature of the subject, was a necessity of 
the circumstances. That literature, however, 
it is just to state, is one with which I have 
long been intimately acquainted. My pre- 
cise argument has not, to my knowledge, 
been previously exhibited ; and I believe I 
have here stated it intelligibly, and placed 
it on an impregnable basis. Entertaining 
this confidence, I must regard the question 
of publication as affirmatively decided with- 
out any consideration of choice. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE ARGUMENT INTRODUCED AND STATED, .... 17 



CHAPTER II. 

THE LOGIC OF MIRACLE, 24 

§ I. — Of Miracles as Matters op Fact, 24 

§ II. — Of Miracles as Evidence for the Divine 
Origin of a Religion, 39 

CHAPTER III. 

CHRIST'S TESTIMONY TO CHRISTIANITY HISTOR- 
ICALLY ASCERTAINED, 55 

CHAPTER IV. 

POSSIBLE HYPOTHESES CONCERNING CHRIST'S 
TESTIMONY TO HIS OWN RELIGION, 87 

CHAPTER V. 

WAS CHRIST'S TESTIMONY FALSE? — HIS MORAL 

CHARACTER, . 94 

XV 



XVI CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER VI. 

WAS CHRIST'S TESTIMONY MISTAKEN ? — HIS IN- 
TELLECTUAL CHARACTER, 107 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE COMBINATION OF MORAL AND INTELLECT- 
UAL EXCELLENCE IN CHRIST, 135 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE SEALING OF CHRIST'S TESTIMONY BY HIS 
DEATH, 141 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE TESTIMONY TRUE, 146 

§ L — The Miracles, 146 

$ IL — The Good Tidings, 169 



CHAPTER X. 

THE SCOPE OF THE TESTIMONY, 189 

CONCLUDING REMARKS, 197 



% esiimottjj rf Cferiat to Cljrotiamfg. 



CHAPTEE I. 

THE ARGUMENT INTRODUCED AND STATED. 

You have never doubted that Christianity is 
from God ; and you regard with indifference, if 
not dislike, those formal reasonings by which the 
religion of Christians is proved to be Divine. 

You may have reached manhood in a commo- 
dious and goodly dwelling. Safe in its shelter 
in infancy, pleasantly expatiating in its chambers 
in boyhood and youth, satisfied with its outlooks 
on the surrounding country, and hearing in its 
every apartment a soft music of remembered love 
and household charity, you have never thought 
of inquiring into the soundness of its masonry 
or the stability of its foundations. And your 
spiritual history has furnished a parallel to all 



18 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

this. In the Christian Church first opened the 
eyes of your mind. Reason, imagination, feel- 
ing, conscience, will, grew insensibly under Chris- 
tian influences. Your intellectual stature has 
not been stunted; your moral health has not 
been impaired; you have felt no want; you have 
known no danger; the light streaming through 
those windows has fallen on your heart like dew 
of heaven, — dew touched with the radiance of 
eternal dawn : and you have never inquired how 
this Christian house of God, in your eyes so 
beautiful, endeared to you by associations tender 
as of the home and sacred as of the temple, was 
founded in the world. 

Your state of mind secures a certain felicity; 
nor can it be said that you altogether fail in the 
Christian obligation of being prepared to render 
a reason for your faith. Experience of moral 
and intellectual health, promoted by Christianity, 
is the logic by which you satisfy yourself, the 
bloom of your Christian graces is the logic by 
which you seek to convince others, that Christi- 
anity is a supreme, God-sent blessing. 

Nevertheless, is there not something to be 
said against you in such a time as this? You 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 19 

accept your religion as a faith ; you feel it as an 
emotion; you illustrate it as a rule of conduct. 
But do not a thousand signs of the time point it 
out as a duty of Christians to be ready to chal- 
lenge for Christianity the sternest inquisition of 
the intellect ? The sentimental, to a large extent 
the ethical, parts of the discussion have been set- 
tled. Christianity is allowed to be a beautiful 
religion, favoring a devout imagination, encour- 
aging the flow of the finer feelings. A nun, 
veiled in white, bending before the altar, an 
angel painted in the cloister-studio of Angelico, 
a child praying at its mother's knee, are pretty 
objects. Nor is it disputed that Christianity 
has done something, or even much, for the eth- 
ical education of mankind. But the question 
now put by skeptics is this : Is Christianity, as 
a whole, trice t Is its moral excellence that of 
a fable, or that of a fact ? Is it not only God- 
like, but from God ? Does it fit in among the 
realities of human history? A fact it plainly 
purports to be, and a most extraordinary fact. 
The first glance at its records discovers a series 
of prodigies, and every masculine mind must 
perceive that they are mixed up inextricably 



20 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

with the truth and worth of Christianity. Rais- 
ing the dead, quelling the tempest by a word, 
creating food for multitudes — these, and simi- 
lar wonders, stand out on the face of the Chris- 
tian record like bold hieroglyphs on some East- 
ern monument. Nor is this all. Between your 
time and that when those preternatural occur- 
rences took place, intervene eighteen hundred 
years. Languages, manners, nationalities, civil- 
izations, have changed. To prove such things, 
had they taken place yesterday, might be diffi- 
cult; you must render convincing proof that 
they were realities, after a lapse of nearly two 
thousand years ; and if you do not, the robust 
and searching intellect of the age will remain 
unsatisfied. Two things go to the coloring of 
the earth — the one is light, the other is iron: 
ethical truth and historical verity are blended 
in Christianity; and we never fully appreciate 
its evidence until we know how the heavenly 
beam of its morality rests on the framework of 
its recorded fact. 

Apart from any special demand of the time, — 
confining our regard exclusively to the individ- 
ual Christian life, — can we feel that we intelli- 



TO CHEISTIANITT. 21 

gently know our faith, if, having received Chris- 
tianity as a treasure from our fathers, and in 
midst of a civilization which sprung out of 
Christianity, we cannot assign it its place in 
the spiritual history of the world ? Is it either 
seemly or profitable for us to know no more of 
our religion than we might have known if we had 
been born in an unvisited isle of the Pacific, and 
had found our Bible amid the surf of the shore ? 

But can a knowledge of the evidence of Chris- 
tianity, comprehensive, symmetrical, and conclu- 
sive, — a knowledge embracing not only its moral 
excellence, but its historical actuality, — be at- 
tained by men engaged in the breathless strug- 
gle of modern existence? Christians, and the 
opponents of Christianity, have a right to expect 
so. Christianity claims to be a religion which 
" he who runs may read ; " the reading intended 
must be presumed to be an intelligent and a 
complete reading ; and if we are right in decid- 
ing that Christianity cannot be historically a 
fable and ethically Divine, it must be an easy 
matter to evince the certitude of its being a fact. 

Now, I believe that Christianity does bear 
with it the evidence required. There is, I con 



22 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

ceive, within reach of men of ordinary informa- 
tion, — requiring, in fact, hardly anything beyond 
the Gospel records, — a proof to be found of 
the Divine origin of Christianity, so powerful, 
so exhaustive, that we may calmly invite its 
scrutiny by the acutest opponent, and so simple 
that we may teach it to our children. It is this 
proof I am now to endeavor to exhibit. Should 
I be successful, I shall have put it in the power 
of many a devout and earnest believer in Chris- 
tianity to be relieved from an uneasy feeling, 
now, I am assured, experienced by such in the 
presence of the skeptic, — a sense that there is 
a flaw in their harness of Christian defence, — 
a painful consciousness that on the question of 
the historical verification of Christianity they 
must be silent. And I shall have enabled 
Christian parents, though immersed in the toils 
of business, to communicate at their firesides 
that amount of instruction touching the histor- 
ical evidence of Christianity which, in days like 
these, and, indeed, in all days, every boy and girl 
in a Christian family ought to possess. 

From the cloud of witnesses to Christianity, I 
select One. He is the centre of that cloud, the 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 23 

chief witness to the Divine religion, both ethi- 
cally and historically — Jesus Christ of Nazareth. 
Ascertaining, on strict historical grounds, the 
testimony of Christ to His own religion, I shall 
show that it contains irrefragable evidence that 
the Christian religion is from God. The argu- 
ment, formally stated, is this : — 

The conjunction of celestially pure, moral 
teaching, with exercise of creative or miracu- 
lous power, in the case of a religious teacher, 
demonstrates his mission to be Divine. 

The personal testimony of Christ renders it 
indubitable that His teaching was pure, and that 
He wielded creative might. 

Therefore, the mission of Jesus Christ was 
Divine, and what He said of Himself and of 
His religion is true. 

The establishment of the second of these 
propositions will constitute the most novel and 
distinctive part of the present treatise ; but 
attention must, in the outset, be directed to 
the first. The evidence of miracle, and the 
connection between miraculous works and Di- 
vine revelation, will be our subject in the suc- 
ceeding chapter. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE LOGIC OF MIRACLE. 

$ I. — Of Miracles as Matters of Fact. 

I offer at this point no definition of a miracle. 
When the word is used in the following section, 
it is meant to indicate such acts as walking on 
the sea, converting water into wine, and impart- 
ing life to the dead. 

Works like these have been pronounced by- 
some incapable of proof. The most celebrated 
argument to this effect is contained in Hume's 
Essay on Miracles. He maintains that no con- 
ceivable testimony could prove the dead to have 
been recalled to life. 

There is little in the premises of Hume's ar- 
gument which, on philosophical grounds, I should 
be disposed to call in question ; there is nothing 
whatever in those premises which it is here neces- 
sary for me to dispute. We can, therefore, meet 
Hume at once on his own ground. 



TESTIMONY OF CHRIST TO CHRISTIANITY. 2h 

" It is experience only," he says, " which gives 
authority to human testimony ; and it is the same 
experience which assures us of the laws of nature. 
When, therefore, these two kinds of experience 
are contrary, we have nothing to do but to sub- 
tract the one from the other, and embrace an 
opinion either on one side or the other, with that 
assurance which arises from the remainder." 
Agreed; so far as the present argument is con- 
cerned. I believe, indeed, that the word of one 
true man is surer evidence than the experience 
of nature's uniformity for a thousand years, and 
that the spiritual philosophy which accords this 
supremacy to the deliberate accents of reason and 
conscience, which owns the majesty of man as 
transcending the authority of nature, is infinitely 
more profound than the philosophy of Hume. 
But in testing the evidence of such acts as have 
been mentioned, let experience be matched 
against experience. 

"When any one," proceeds Hume, "tells me 
that he saw a dead man restored to life, I imme- 
diately consider with myself whether it be more 
probable that this person should either deceive 
or be deceived, or that the fact which he relates 



26 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

should really have happened. I weigh the one 
miracle against the other ; and according to the 
superiority which I discover, I pronounce my de- 
cision, and always reject the greater miracle. If 
the falsehood of his testimony would be more 
miraculous than the event which he relates, then, 
and not till then, can he pretend, to demand my 
belief or opinion." 

Exactly ; no statement could be more reasona- 
ble. Let us proceed, then, to the comparison. 
The Christian has to produce testimony to mira- 
cle whose falsehood would be a mightier wonder 
than the miracle attested, and Hume has to weigh 
miracle against miracle. 

What was the next step to be taken in Hume's 
argument ? What did his own statement require 
him to do? Clearly, to take up the miracles 
which Christians allege to be true ; to set their 
evidence fully and distinctly forth ; and to point 
out that, however plausible that evidence might 
be, its fallaciousness would be no miracle com- 
pared with the miracle it affirmed. This, I say, 
is what the law on the case, as laid down by 
Hume, required ; this is what, in his own court 
of evidence, Hume prescribed. 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 27 

But every reader of Hume's Essay knows that 
he has doue nothing of the sort. The nature of 
the evidence required for the Christian miracles 
once fairly stated, those miracles are quietly put 
by him out of court. The trial proceeds by 
proxy. Hume does not ask what proof is offered 
that the Christian miracles took place ; he calls 
to the bar certain " miracles " with which Chris- 
tianity has nothing to do, enters upon their evi- 
dence, condemns them as falsities, and then calmly 
informs the court that the Christian miracles are 
disproven. Vespasian, according to Tacitus, per- 
formed two miraculous cures; the Cardinal de 
Retz mentions a " miracle " of the reality of which 
he was assured ; and sundry prodigies are said to 
have taken place at the grave of the Abbe Paris. 
These last, Hume informs us, " might, with some 
appearance of reason, be said to surpass in evi- 
dence and authority" the miracles of the Saviour. 
But it is really too much to ask us to take his 
judgment in such a case. Our folly would be 
unexampled and inconceivable if we did not in- 
sist upon putting aside his instances of miracle, 
and claiming what he has himself accorded us, 
the right to select a crucial instance of our own. 



28 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

There is not, to my knowledge, in the whole 
range of literature an evasion like that in Hume's 
Essay on Miracles. I can find no word, no figure 
of speech, no parallel case, by which adequately 
to represent its enormity. If we suppose a man 
of the highest character put on trial for his life, 
informed of the law by which he is to be judged, 
then bidden to stand aside until some one who 
claims a distant relationship to him, and has no 
character to plead, is tried in his stead, and lastly 
recalled to be told that he is capitally condemn- 
ed, we shall have no more than faintly shadowed 
forth the outrageousness of Hume's proceeding. 
" Jesus Christ," he virtually proceeds, " is alleged 
to have given sight to the blind. He may stand 
aside ; here is a miracle performed by the god 
Serapis, — a bull with some speciality about the 
tail, — through instrumentality of Vespasian, and 
we shall take it up instead. Jesus Christ is said 
to have made the lame walk. Well : the Cardi- 
nal de Retz was informed that a man who rubbed 
holy oil on the stump of his leg recovered powers 
of walking ; yet there was no miracle, and, of 
course, none was performed by Christ. Jesus is 
affirmed to have raised the dead. We shall prove 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 29 

the negative if we can make it appear that cer- 
tain persons falsely or mistakenly alleged them- 
selves to have derived advantage from touching 
the tomb of Abbe Paris." Such is literally 
Hume's mode of applying his theory that the oc- 
currence of a miracle must be a greater wonder, 
and, therefore, less credible, than the falsehood 
or mistake of any conceivable testimony to the 
miracles related in the Gospels. 

Now, I accept Hume's law; but I decline to 
have the Christian miracles represented by those 
which he adduces. His wonders I shall indeed 
take up, and shall point out that their evidence 
falls infinitely short of that for the true miracles. 
But, first, I shall exercise the right which is man- 
ifestly mine to choose an instance in which false 
evidence would be a greater wonder than actual 
miracle. I lay my hand on the testimony of 
Jesus Christ to the fact that he raised the dead. 
The falsehood or mistake of that testimony 
would, I submit, be a greater miracle than its 
literal correctness. Before we return to Hume, 
therefore, we must have the testimony of Christ 
fairly examined. 

Mr. Baden Powell, in his argument against 



30 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

miracles, aimed at greater philosophical precis- 
ion and profundity than Hume, and failed sig- 
nally to attain them. Hume's procedure was 
essentially to sum up probabilities, and to con- 
clude that those against a miracle rendered its 
having happened so supremely unlikely, that 
examination of the evidence of miracle in par- 
ticular cases was unnecessary. His mistake oc- 
curred in the summing up of his probabilities ; 
he omitted a kind of testimony, the probability 
of whose falsehood he would have found less 
than the probability that a miracle had occurred. 
But Mr. Powell passed from Hume's probability 
against miracles, accumulated by induction, to 
certainty that they must be false, derived from 
a priori considerations. He asserted the order 
and constancy of physical causes to be " a pri- 
mary law of belief." He spoke of " the positive 
scientific idea," of the " order of nature," of " the 
grand foundation-conception of universal law," 
and the " impossibility " of any change in the 
existing conditions of material agents, "unless 
through the invariable operation of a series of 
eternally-impressed consequences " of a physical 
nature. He argued, therefore, that the mere 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 31 

dictate of reason requires and empowers a man 
to disbelieve in a miracle. 

It is necessary to exercise care in distinguish- 
ing the position on this question taken up by- 
Mr. Powell. He did not expressly refuse to 
look at the evidence of miracle, considered as 
matter of fact. So, at least, I understand him 
to mean, when he says that a miracle may be 
regarded "as a physical event," and "investi- 
gated by reason and physical evidence." But 
he insisted that even this investigation should 
be carried on in the light of a particular theory 
— namely, that the fact is referable to "physical 
causes," and has " ceased to be supernatural." I 
submit, on the other hand, that what is called 
a miracle admits, in the first instance, of being 
examined as a fact pure and simple, without 
theory of any kind, without reference to cause, 
physical or spiritual, natural or supernatural; 
and I maintain this to be the true philosophical 
procedure in the case. 

Is there, then, a "primary law of belief," ren- 
dering it absolutely binding on the intellect to 
regard every conceivable fact, attested by the 



32 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

senses, as a link in a chain stretching from eter- 
nity to eternity of physical causes? 

Primary laws of belief there assuredly are, 
and reason requires my submission to them. 
All the testimony in the world could not make 
me believe that the angles of a triangle are 
equal to more than two right angles. It is en- 
tirely legitimate, also, that I should take along 
with me, in every inquiry, the fact that the 
angles of a triangle are equal to precisely two 
right angles ; and if, in any case of evidence, a 
contravention of this fact is implied, I am not 
required to cast another glance at it. All this 
is, on my part, matter neither of attainment nor 
of choice. My mind can no more disbelieve 
mathematical truth, when its terms are compre- 
hended, than it can, by mere effort of will, pass 
out of existence. If the Bible required me to 
believe that twice two are five, it would be out 
of my power to do so; if mathematical truth 
were violated by any of the Gospel miracles, I 
should be justified by common sense in not even 
examining their evidence. 

But it is surely in the power of common sense, 
as it is certainly in that of philosophy, to discern 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 33 

that the imputation of mathematical necessity 
to the sequence of natural phenomena is a com- 
plete subversion of reason. The century inter- 
vening between Hume and Powell was rich in 
physical discovery, and contributed magnificent 
illustrations of the extent, the harmony, the 
steadfastness of nature's laws ; but it is strange 
that even such a century should have led any 
one to believe the evidence of inductive science 
identical with that of mathematical truth. One 
marks with wonder the fanatic vehemence with 
which Mr. Powell insists that stones fall, trees 
grow, and planets wheel around the sun, by 
laws immutable as those of geometry. To this 
mystic faith in nature's sequences, to this novel 
and marvellous enthusiasm, arid as the desert, 
hot as a brick-kiln, it is as incredible that the 
cloud I see flitting yonder from east to west 
should have been flitting from north to south, 
as that a mathematical whole should be less 
than a mathematical part. Into the depths of 
the past eternity sweeps the chain of physical 
causes directing the way of that cloudy film ; 
and there is no power in the universe, no spirit, 
no God, that could have modified the smallest 



34 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

link in the chain. It is a strange faith, but a 
very ghastly one. The completeness with which 
Powell banishes spirit-power from the universe 
is terrible. You must not admit even the possi- 
bility that any present fact should have a super- 
natural spiritual cause ; and " the idea of c crea- 
tion'" in the past is "rejected." Out of the far 
eternity, guided by no hand, rattles the chariot 
of the universe; into the far eternity, bearing 
no rider, rolls that chariot away; no God in 
the past, no God in the present, no God in the 
future; and, for the Father of the generations 
of men, for the Spirit of light, of life, of love, 
the infernal mockery of a "grand foundation- 
conception of universal law," and some unimag- 
inable "spirituality,'' which is but a term for 
nonentity. 

" My God ! I'd rather be 
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn/' 

So long as the human intellect continues un- 
changed, such faith as Mr. Powell's must remain 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 35 

the peculiarity of the individual scientific dog- 
matist, the fixed idea of the individual scien- 
tific fanatic. It requires, therefore, no further 
refutation. 

It will be well, however, to look somewhat 
closely into those laws of nature which are pro- 
nounced so austere, that constancy of nature 
which is declared to be, even in idea, inviolable. 

Materialists maintain with one voice that we 
are unable to detect connection between nature's 
causes and nature's effects. We observe, for 
instance, that fire applied to wood consumes it, 
but we detect no power in the fire to consume 
wood ; prior to observation, we have no reason 
to believe that fire will not cause stones or water 
to break into flame. We mark a succession of 
phenomena; the nexus between them, if any 
such nexus exist, we cannot discover. Such is 
the view of nature's laws adopted without qual- 
ification by Mr. J. S. Mill, and held by the whole 
Positivist school. 

What is the attitude in which these gentle- 
men stand towards facts purporting to be ob- 
served and ascertained? It ought to be, and 
in most cases it is, one of open-minded watch- 



36 TEE TESTIMONY OF CERIST 

fulness. Observation has revealed to them an 
order in certain phenomena, which order they 
call a law, but they are prepared at any moment 
to accept the evidence of observation against it. 
The law of to-day may, they know, be discred- ■ 
ited by the fact of to-morrow. Should move- 
ments, for example, be observed in the stellar 
heavens, irreconcilable with the law of gravita- 
tion, the old law would stoop to the new fact, 
and the magnificent discovery of Xewton would 
be annihilated by the simple evidence of the 
senses. Should two facts be observed, irrecon- 
cilable, apparently, either with known laws or 
with each other, then philosophers would be- 
lieve both. They might suspend judgment ; 
they might extend observation ; they might in- 
stitute experiments more delicate and compre- 
hensive; but so long as each fact rested on its 
own unimpeachable evidence, they would ac- 
cept it. 

In all this they would but prove themselves 
true disciples of the Baconian philosophy. That 
philosophy concerns itself comparatively little 
with laws. Its ordinances are directed to fact, and 
the observation of fact ; and the first of its pre- 



TO CHEISTIANITT. 37 

cepts is to honor with implicit confidence the see- 
ing eye, the hearing ear, the touching hand, the 
truth-speaking tongue. 

w The truth-speaking tongue " — that is an im- 
portant addition. Observation is the instrument 
used by the individual in cultivating science. But 
the observation of the individual cannot carry sci- 
ence far. What is the cement which joins obser- 
vation to observation, which connects that of one 
generation to that of another, and from the facts 
ascertained by individuals builds up the experi- 
ence of the race ? There can be but one answer. 
The child may speak it ; the philosopher can add 
to it not one jot or tittle : the knowledge of man- 
kind is aggregated by testimony. And all sound 
philosophy accords to well-sifted testimony the 
same respect as to accurately-made observation. 

Now, it is here claimed, on behalf of the al- 
leged facts of Christ's life, that they be treated 
like any other facts purporting to be accurately 
observed and attested. Let the word " miracle " 
be put aside. Did Christ walk on the sea ? Did 
He cause the dead to arise ? Did He give sight 
to the blind by a word? Did He feed multi- 
tudes with a few loaves and fishes? Let no 



38 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

question be put as to how He did these things, 
or whether, in doing them, He suspended the 
laws of nature. The inquiry was, Are they mat- 
ters of fact ? They are more startling than ordi- 
nary occurrences; let their evidence, then, be 
more rigidly scrutinized. Was the eye which 
saw them filmed by enthusiasm, or unsteadied 
by agitation? Was the ear which heard of 
them dulled with prejudice, or opened wide in 
credulity? Was the tongue which reported 
them set agoing by any selfish motive? Did 
falsehood misrepresent, or stupidity miscon- 
ceive, or fanaticism distort, or imagination in- 
vent them? Hang the scales of evidence with 
such delicacy that they will quiver at the touch 
of a sunbeam ; sift each grain of proof with lin- 
gering reflection, and search it with vigilant sa- 
gacity ; let judgment look with her most steadfast 
gaze, and suspicion with her keenest glance : but 
if, when the facts of Christ's life are thus weighed 
in the balances, they are not found wanting, let 
them, in God's name, be believed. Kay, since 
the appeal is to philosophy, let them be accepted 
for her sake. If observation and testimony are 
scorned, not because they cannot endure scrutiny 



TO CHEISTIAmTY. 39 

and cross-examination, but because the facts at- 
tested are declared a priori incredible, the rivets 
are taken out of human knowledge, the fabric of 
philosophy crumbles into dust, and the eye of 
man, seared by the lightnings of his pride, is no 
longer a fit instrument for observing, in its com- 
prehensiveness, the universe of God. Let science, 
if she will, wait for another explanation of the 
mighty works of Christ than that offered by 
Christians; but if she refuses to acknowledge 
well-attested fact, she will act suicidally. She 
may have saved herself from being carried in the 
triumph of the Gospel, but she will have laid the 
aspic on her breast. 

$ II. — Of Hieacles as Evidence foe the Divete Okiges 
of a Religion. 

The claim of mysterious and unprecedented oc- 
currences, be then- character what it may, to have 
their evidence tried as matters of fact, is one 
thing ; the proposition that such occurrences may 
constitute, in whole or in part, evidence that a 
religion is from God, is another. 

Viewed in this light, miracles occupy the boun- 
dary line between natural religion and a re vela- 



40 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

tion added to the religion of nature. Their evi- 
dence is addressed to the believer in a God, and 
connects itself with the knowledge of God, which 
commends itself naturally to man's reason and 
conscience. 

The sum of truth touching the Deity, arrived 
at by natural religion, is comprised essentially in 
two ideas : that God is omnipotent, and that he 
is holy. Infinite power, infinite purity : such is 
the twofold conception of Deity which finds its 
germs, if not its development, in the natural rea- 
son and the natural conscience. 

The idea of power seems to come first in the 
order of time. "The only point of theology," 
says an acute and learned reasoner, " in which we 
shall find a consent of mankind almost universal, 
is, that there is invisible, intelligent power in the 
world." In the initial stages of civilization, when 
the great truths, the mighty thoughts and hopes, 
"which make us men," are breaking faintly 
through the haze of moral and intellectual dawn, 
the Deity is vaguely imaged as a force transcend- 
ing the force of man — a force with which it is 
vain to contend — a force which generally is cruel 
as it is terrible. The votary kneels before the 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 41 

hideous, blood-stained idol, not loving, not rever- 
ing, only trembling. The light from beyond 
tinges the atmosphere of earth with a lurid glare, 
and there is no mercy in the voice of the thun- 
der. As intellect develops, and man emerges 
from the cowering and squalid misery of savage 
existence, his deities become humanized. More 
and more the threads of law are seen running 
through creation ; the idea of a unity of those 
threads in a single hand becomes more distinct ; 
and the Greek poet soars to the conception of 
the entire universe bound by gold chains about 
the feet of Zeus. Philosophy, meanwhile, strug- 
gles towards the same elevation, and if it cannot 
discover a living God, names at least a Cause of 
causes. Neither the popular mind, indeed, nor the 
philosophic inquirer, has been able without Divine 
aid to realize steadily the idea of one creating, all- 
powerful God. It is when this magnificent truth, 
is unveiled, sunlike, by the Almighty himself, 
that it is flashed back from the mirror of finite 
intellect. What the human mind could not con- 
clusively discover, or permanently retain, it can 
trace the grounds of when revealed, and discern 
that the might of the universe centres in God. 



42 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

At the utmost limit of mere human attainment 
the Bible commences : " In the beginning God 
created the heavens and the earth." 

If the idea of power as pertaining to Deity has 
been embodied in all religions, the idea of moral 
purity as an attribute of the Divine character has 
also, though less firmly, been ap]:>rehended. It is 
no doubt true, that in neither of the great families 
into which the religions of nature are divided, 
the polytheistic and the pantheistic, has the light 
of moral purity been held steadily before the eyes 
of men. But among nations which have retained 
any healthiness and natural freshness of mind, 
the habit of honoring the gods has always been 
more or less associated with a belief in their sym- 
pathy with virtue. In the earlier period of the 
Roman Commonwealth this was conspicuously 
the case. The reflective action of the human in- 
tellect in philosophy tended to the same result. 
The Socratic influence, working through the 
whole Platonic development, and presenting the 
highest and purest reading of man's moral intui- 
tions to which unaided reason attained, exalted 
the moral element in the Divine, and imaged God 
as infinite Tightness, as well as boundless power. 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 43 

It is to the first of these ideas — the idea that 
God is the Infinite Power — that miraculous evi- 
dence in support of a religion is primarily ad- 
dressed ; but the logic of miracle rests fundamen- 
tally upon both. ISTo one who has, with anything 
of Christian profundity, embraced the idea of 
God's holiness, can believe that the mere mechan- 
ical exhibition of power could afford valid grounds 
for believing a religion Divine. As the spiritual 
significance of Christ's miracles, and their conjunc- 
tion with immaculate teaching, will be found to 
bear directly on the historical evidence that they 
took place, I must dwell for a little on the asso- 
ciation of moral perfection with supernatural 
power in every miracle that Divinely seals a re- 
ligion. 

It has been said that false religions lean to- 
wards the acknowledgment that the gods are on 
the side of virtue. But so faint and confused 
has been this acknowledgment, that we, as Chris- 
tions, can plainly discern the highest moral eleva- 
tion reached by heathenism to have been defiance 
of the deity. The sublimest thing known to me 
in antiquity is the still small voice of conscience, 
speaking with conscious and inalienable suprema- 



44 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

cy, and quelling the greatest known power in the 
universe. Horace, in the grandest passage he 
ever wrote, completes his picture of the just man 
with the declaration that not even the great hand 
of thundering Jove could make him quail : — 

" Justum et tenacem propositi viram, 
Non civium ardor prava jubentium 
Non vultus instantis tyranni 
Mente quatit solida, neque Auster, 
Dux inquieti turbidus Adriae, 
Nec fulminantis magna manus Jovis." 1 

More magnificent still is the idealization of the 
same thought in the tragic poetry of Greece. 
^Eschylus felt that Zeus could chain Prometheus 
on his rock, and set the vulture to tear out his 
throbbing heart ; but he felt also that the unjust 
god was inferior to the tortured mortal, and that 
the vulture could never tear out self-approval, or 

l " Not the rage of the people, pressing to hurtful measures, 
not the aspect of a threatening tyrant, can shake from his settled 
purpose the man who is just and determined in his resolution ; 
nor can the south wind, that tumultuous ruler of the restless 
Adriatic, nor the mighty hand of thundering Jove." — Smart's 
Horace. Book III., Ode 3. 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 45 

the sovereign sense of right, from that agonized 
bosom. 1 In the wrinklings of the brow of Pro- 
metheus, we may read that moral law is a higher, 
a greater, a mightier thing, than all the material 
power in the universe. 

Now, it is in the God of Christianity, and in 
Him alone, that infinite power and infinite jus- 
tice, holiness, and truth are combined. The just 
and the true Christian does not defy the God in 
whose hand the thunders rest, because he knows 
with immovable assurance that those thunders 
are directed by justice, winged with mercy, and 
clasped about with love. If, however, we admit 
that an exhibition of mere power could silence 
conscience, if we grant that a miracle apart from, 
or in contradiction to, moral purity, is sufficient 
to induce us to bend the knee, — we place our- 
selves on a lower stage of moral elevation than 
the just man of the Epicurean Horace, or the 
vulture-torn hero of Greek tragedy. 

The principle on which I proceed was recog- 
nized by the greatest of English apologists, — per- 

1 It is now generally doubted by philologers whether this is 
the moral purport designed by JEschylus for his great drama. 
The question does not affect the pertinency of the illustration. 



46 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

haps the greatest apologist, and certainly one of 
the greatest philosophers, that ever lived, — 
Bishop Butler. A professed revelation, Butler 
declared, might "contain clear immoralities or 
contradictions; and," he adds, "either of these 
would prove it false." x Paley never grasped But- 
ler's doctrine of conscience, and his discussion of 
the miraculous evidence of Christianity has too 
much the air of a mere mechanical theory. The 
Christian miracles can be proved as mere histori- 
cal facts, and Paley's treatment of the historical 
question is masterly ; but in order to know them 
in their full significance, — in order to associate 
them with the spiritual verities of Christianity, — 
in order to recognize their validity in support of 
a religion, — we must remember more distinctly 
than Paley that they were exhibitions of Divine 
power by a Divinely Holy Saviour, in the j>romul- 
gation of Divinely pure doctrines. Instead of 
impairing their strict force in evidence by thus 
regarding them, we secure and enhance it. 

It is now in place to say explicitly what is here 
meant by a miracle capable of constituting part 
of the evidence that a religion is from God. 

i Analogy, Part II., Chap. 3. 



TO CHBISTIAmTY. 47 

A miracle is an occasional display of Divine 
poicer, independently of those sequences of natu- 
ral laic through which God commonly acts. 

We now occupy entirely different ground from 
that on which we stood when considering the 
evidence of miracles as mere matters of fact. If 
miracles are regarded as works of God, we are 
led to a different theory of nature's constancy 
from that of the materialistic philosophers whose 
views we examined. We may, indeed, agree 
with those reasoners, that we cannot see or touch 
the power which associates nature's causes with 
nature's effects ; but mighty instincts, intellectual 
and moral, compel us to believe that such a power 
exists, and that it is none other than the originat- 
ing Mind of the universe, the Almighty One who 
created and who sustains all things. 

What, on this hypothesis, is the constancy of 
nature ? It is the mode in which the Almighty 
puts forth His power, the majestic consistency of 
His will, the measured music in which creation 
hymns His praise. He is faithful ; He is in na- 
ture changeless; in the ordinary providential 
government of the world He maintains the regu- 
larity of His working. But the laws of nature are 



48 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

laws by which He regulates, not laws by which 
He is bound. The vision of existence, infinite in 
beauty, ineffable in constancies of traceless change, 
is "the garment we see Him by." And if, for 
purposes of unfathomable wisdom, He waves 
aside that garment, and makes bare His arm, — if, 
when men forget God for His long silence, and 
take nature for Himself, He pierces her muffling 
imagery by the lightning of His power, and acts 
independently of her processes, — shall we deem 
His acting incredible ? 

Nature is a constant revelation of God to man, 
after He has, so to speak, announced Himself. 
But nature alone never brought man into the 
presence of God, or kept him long mindful of his 
Father. Man would have sunk again and again 
into polytheism, if God had not, from era to era, 
said, in accents clearer than those of nature, " Lo, 
I am here ! " 

In the earliest ages the flickering flame of Di- 
vine knowledge would have expired altogether, 
but for His reluming hand. Superstition and 
atheism would have divided mankind, but for the 
spark of Divine life, kindled immediately by God, 
that lived in the heart of patriarch and sage. 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 49 

But when the light of primeval revelation was 
vanishing from the earth, He broke silence, re- 
vealed Himself miraculously, and through long 
Pagan centuries jDreserved in the hills of Judea a 
faith in one God. 

When the husk of ancient civilization was to be 
thrown off, and the expansive energy of a religion 
for all mankind was to be added to the moral and 
intellectual agencies operating on the mind of the 
race, — when ancient superstition was sinking in 
pale ashes, and philosophy was hanging her head 
in despair of finding truth, and vice was attaining 
satanic dimensions, and misery was reaching an 
intensity as of hell, — then, once more, did the 
God-force beckon nature to be still, and in person 
of the Holy Jesus, wielding the might of pure 
Deity independently of all natural sequences, re- 
veal that religion which, if but realized and uni- 
versal, would brighten the hills of earth with the 
hues of heaven's landscape, and bring angels down 
to dwell with men in earthly valleys. 

Miracles are thus shown to be in harmony with 
a higher constancy than that of physical nature, 
a constancy of eternal purpose and everlasting 
wisdom, a constancy of mercy in the moral gov- 

4 



50 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

ernment of the world, a constancy of creative 
power varying at pleasure its modes and habi- 
tudes. 

It is explicitly affirmed by Mr. J. Stuart Mill 
that on this view of the constancy of nature, — 
on the hypothesis that the governing power of 
the universe is an infinitely wise and Almighty 
God, — a miracle is no infraction of nature's har- 
mony and concord, and, of course, not beyond 
reach of proof. 1 

Another philosopher, on whose cool, clear in- 
tellect and massive sense Englishmen place pe- 
culiar confidence, preceded Mr. Mill in an ex- 
press and decisive affirmation to the same effect. 
" Every rational thinking man," said John Locke, 
" must conclude as Mcodemus did : ' We know 
that thou art a teacher come from God ; for no 
man can do these signs which thou doest, except 
God be with him.'" 2 

A greater than either Locke or Mill had antici- 
pated both in a similar statement. Lord Bacon 
declared that, " in regard of the work of redemp- 
tion," to which " all God's signs and miracles do 

i System of Logic, Chap. 25. 2 Locke's Discourse of Miracles. 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 51 

refer," the Almighty could indeed "break the law 
of nature by miracles." The Saviour is called 
by the father of modern philosophy " a Lord of 
nature in His miracles." 1 I know not, in fact, 
where the whole logic of miracle is so admirably 
apprehended as in the writings of Bacon. 

There are defenders of Christianity in the pres- 
ent day who hint in various ways that miracles 
are rather incumbrances than helps in exhibiting 
evidence that the religion of Christ is Divine. It 
will be time to pronounce finally upon this opin- 
ion when we ascertain the place assigned by 
Christ himself to miracles in His testimony to 
His Messiahship. Meanwhile, I may remark that 
the Christian revelation purports to extend our 
knowledge as well as to direct our life ; and that 
a man's personal excellence, however great, could 
not authenticate statements made by him, touch- 
ing spiritual things unseen by man, and spiritual 
relations determined not by man but by God. I 
must, for my own part, declare myself in the po- 
sition of those thinkers who have professed their 
inability to conceive any other mode than the 
miraculous, in which God could set His seal to 

i Bacon's Confession of Faith. 



52 TEE TESTIMONY OF CEEIST 

the information conveyed to the world by a 
celestial messenger speaking in His name. And 
whatever the devout but dreamy theorist or the 
feeble sentimentalist may allege, tremendous is 
the might of that instinct which teaches unsophis- 
ticated man to impute authority to miraculous 
manifestations of Divine Power, which leads him 
trembling to ask, when winds and waves are 
hushed at the word of Christ, What manner of 
man is this ? 

Instead of being an incumbrance in the way of 
the Christian apologist, the fact that a strictly 
evidential character is imputed to miracles in the 
New Testament, is a powerful and sublime illus- 
tration of the superiority of the Christian religion 
to every other which has appeared in the world. 
It was Locke, I think, who first clearly affirmed 
that the Divine religion alone appeals to miracles. 
The religions of Paganism, he pointed out with 
admirable force and pertinency, could not base 
their pretensions upon exhibitions of Divine 
power, because they were not exclusive. Poly- 
theism recognized the authority of a thousand 
gods in a thousand localities, and each of the 
thousand could act upon the affairs of men. The 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 53 

Jewish religion alone made clear the truth that 
there is but one God ; the Jews only knew that 
the power of Jehovah was supreme, and that all 
other gods were idols dumb; the Jews alone, 
therefore, could attach significance to a miracle 
as manifesting the presence of the Infinite Power. 
They did not rise to a conception of the spiritual 
verity of Christ's teaching ; but even in asking a 
sign they stood higher than the whole Pagan 
world. The Power that created and sustains 
this universe is Divine ; power transcending the 
power of nature, and the emulation of devils, 
must be from God : this magnificent truth of nat- 
ural religion, this irrefragable logic of miracle, 
was held firmly by the Jew, not by the Greek. 
And if miraculous energy was of old the seemly 
and conclusive refutation of that superstition 
which peopled every wood and valley with gods, 
so in these last days, when science has passed to 
the opposite extreme, and asserts that there is no 
Divine controlling power in the universe, — that 
matter moves eternally to its own hoarse music, 
and obeys eternally its own mechanical laws, — 
that spirit may be a faint, inconceivable light, 
shimmering through the universe, but can exert 



54 TESTIMONY OF CHRIST TO CHRISTIANITY. 

no force independent of the forces of matter, — 
we also require, and ought to hold fast, the at- 
testation made by Christ, in raising the dead, 
quelling the tempest, and producing food from 
nothing, that the Divine Spirit is the Omnipotent 
Maker of the world. We have not yet arrived 
at a stage in human progress at which to discard 
the lessons taught to former generations ; nor can 
it be a safe and wise allegation that the writing 
of God's hand has waxed old. Pride was the be- 
setting sin of man in the beginning, and it will 
apparently beset him to the end. It led him 
once to cast back God's fair gift of Eden, and it 
tempts him now to turn from those goodly trees 
and beauteous flowers of truth which, from age 
to age, God has planted in the garden of spiritual 
knowledge. Unless we preserve in its integrity 
the idea that universal power centres in the hand 
of God, we shall, with all our culture, relapse into 
Polytheism ; and I do not believe that this idea 
can ever be firmly embraced unless we accept the 
fact of miracle. 






CHAPTER III. 

CHRIST'S TESTIMONY TO CHRISTIANITY HISTORI- 
CALLY ASCERTAINED. 

Our business is to adduce proof that Chris- 
tianity is Divine ; we must guard against taking 
for granted what we have to establish. Chris- 
tians are justly offended by the ironical homage 
to their religion implied in Hume's remark, that 
it dispenses with evidence, as required by reason, 
and reposes securely upon faith ; but their con- 
duct in some instances lends color to the skep- 
tical innuendo. They shrink from speaking of 
Christ and of Scripture in the sole manner 
which the unbeliever they address can admit 
to be legitimate. If we set out with the sup- 
position that Jesus is God, and that the Bible 
is inspired, our duty is confined to kneeling be- 
fore the One, reverently perusing the other, and 
calling on all men to do the same. Argument is 
in that case at an end; there is room only for 
exhortation and appeal. But if our object is to 



56 TEE TESTIMOXY OF CHRIST 

convince the doubter or to inform the ignorant, 
our procedure must be different. Do we seek to 
prove that He who appeared to the eye of sense 
a mere man was indeed the Son of God with 
power? We must set out from that humanity 
touching which there can be no doubt. Do we 
aim at showing that the Scriptures, seeming to 
the bodily eye like any other bound volume, are 
the record, inspired by God's Spirit, of God's 
special dealings with our race? We must ap- 
proach them by the path of history; we must 
evince their reliability, in the first instance, on 
mere historical grounds. In the assembly of 
Christians we shall sing hymns to Christ; on 
Mars Hill, we must start from an unknown God. 
It may be useful to Christians who have never 
known a doubt to approach the subject in this 
manner. As the forms and colors of the clouds 
which have been floating over us since infancy 
are seldom observed with care, or known with 
accuracy, so the facts of Christ's life, which have 
been before our mind's eye since childhood, 
are apt to lose distinctness and angularity, — 
to waver in a mirage-like enchantment of dis- 
tance and devotion, — to be realized with no 



TO CHBISTIAXITT. 57 

precision or minuteness. Yet, the more any- 
one reads and reflects, the more will he be 
convinced that Christianity is to be known in 
no way so well as by looking boldly and closely 
into its facts. And as for the objections of skep- 
tics, I hold no conviction more firmly than that 
our urgent and importunate demand, addressed 
to the Carlyles, the John Stuart Mills, the G-. H. 
Leweses, and whatever else there may be of 
able mind among us refusing to own the reli- 
gion of the Bible as God's express revelation to 
man, ought to be just this — that, apart from any 
theory, they will look Jesus Christ in the face, 
and try to account for Him as a historical char- 
acter. Let us press through the throng of cen- 
turies — let us get near Christ — let us touch the 
hem of His garment, — then will virtue go out 
of Him to heal us, and to conciliate or to abash 
opposition. 

What does history inform us that Christ said 
for Himself? 

As we reach the earlier centuries of our era, 
before Christianity has become universally the 
religion of Europe, we find it assailed by vari- 
ous adversaries. Among these, in the fourth, 



58 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

third, and second centuries, were Julian, Por- 
phyry, and Celsus. These all — the fact is no- 
torious — referred to Christ as having professed 
Himself able to work miracles. They consid- 
ered those miracles an exhibition of magical 
arts ; but they never thought of doubting that 
Christ said He was endowed with miraculous 
power. 

The Jewish accounts of Jesus of Nazareth are 
to the same effect. The Talmudical literature, 
commencing in the second century, gives promi- 
nence to Christ's alleged miracles. "The later 
Jews," says Mr. Baden Powell, -in "Essays and 
Reviews," "adopted the strange legend of the 
JSepher Toldeth Jehsu (Book of the Generation 
of Jesus), which describes His miracles substan- 
tially as in the Gospels, but says that He ob- 
tained His power by hiding Himself in the tem- 
ple, and possessing Himself of the secret ineffa- 
ble name, by virtue of which such wonders could 
be wrought." Mr. Powell quotes also from Lim- 
borch this statement of Orobio, a Jewish writer : 
— "The Jews disbelieved not because they de- 
nied that the works which are related in the 
Gospels were done by Jesus, but because they 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 59 

did not suffer themselves to be persuaded by 
them that Jesus was the Messiah." 

We have arrived at one clearly indubitable 
and highly important fact. The portrait of 
Christ, as projected on the mirror of profane 
history, is the portrait of a professed miracle- 
worker. 

But have we any account of Christ, dating 
from His own time, or near it, drawn up by 
persons who knew Him, or were intimately ac- 
quainted with those who did, and, on the whole, 
possessing historical reliability? I shall answer 
the question in a way which is new, but which, 
though simple, will, I think, be satisfactory. By 
a bridge which may seem narrow, but which will 
prove inflexibly strong, we shall be able to place 
ourselves among the contemporaries of Christ, 
and to hear what they have to say of their Lord. 

Tacitus, treating, in his Annals, of the fire of 
Rome in the reign of Nero, mentions that it was 
ascribed by common report to the emperor, and 
that his majesty took means to suppress the ru- 
mor. The circumstances are thus detailed by 
Tacitus: — "Nero judicially accused of the of- 
fence, and punished with most studied torments, 



60 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

a set of men, hated for their wickedness, who 
were commonly called Christians. The author 
of that sect was Christ, who, in the reign of Ti- 
berius, suffered death by sentence of the procu- 
rator Pontius Pilate. The vile superstition, re- 
pressed for a time, again broke out, not only in 
Judea, the nest of the mischief, but in the city 
also, whither all atrocious and scandalous things 
flow, and where all flourish. At first those only 
were apprehended who confessed themselves of 
that sect ; afterwards a vast multitude discovered 
by them, all of whom were condemned, not so 
much for the crime of burning the city as for their 
enmity to mankind. Their executions were so 
contrived as to expose them to derision and con- 
tempt. Some were covered with the skins of 
wild beasts, that they might be torn to pieces ; 
some were crucified ; while others, having been 
daubed over with combustible materials, were set 
up as lights in the night time, and thus burnt to 
death. For these spectacles Nero gave his own 
gardens, and, at the same time, exhibited there 
the diversions of the circus, sometimes standing 
in the crowd as a spectator, in the habit of a 
charioteer, and at other times driving a chariot 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 61 

himself; until at length these men, though really 
criminal, and deserving exemplary punishment, 
began to be commiserated, as people who were 
destroyed, not out of regard to the j^ublic welfare, 
but only to gratify the cruelty of one man." 

The historical character of this passage is un- 
disputed. "The most skeptical criticism," says 
Gibbon, whose authority in such a case is abso- 
lutely conclusive, " is obliged to respect the integ- 
rity of this celebrated passage of Tacitus." 

Apprehending firmly this statement of the great 
historian, let us particularize a few facts which it 
puts beyond doubt : — 

A religious sect, which had originated in re- 
mote Judea, a land held in contempt and detes- 
tation throughout the civilized world of antiquity, 
had become, in Kero's time, a " vast multitude " 
in the city of Rome. 

This sect took the name of Christ. They were 
Christians. It was not primarily by holding a 
doctrine, enjoining a rule of practice, or celebrat- 
ing peculiar rites, that they distinguished them- 
selves, and were distinguished by others ; it was 
by naming the name of Christ, and following 
Him. 



62 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

These Christians retained their designation, 
and adhered to Christ, in the midst of intense 
and inhuman hatred. So obnoxious were they 
to the inhabitants of Rome, that it was advan- 
tageous to Nero to put them to death, on a notori- 
ously false accusation, in a manner so diabolically 
cruel that it would have excited indignation if 
exercised against the most destructive beasts of 
prey, or the most repulsive and pernicious ver- 
min. 

The Person, named Christ, after whom these 
Christians called themselves, must, therefore, be 
concluded to have stamped upon them His influ- 
ence with tremendous potency and vivid dis- 
tinctness. 

For the rise of this new power on earth, the 
power, namely, proceeding from Christ, Tacitus 
affords us a definite, strictly-limited, chronologi- 
cal place in history. Nero's persecution of the 
Christians took place in the sixty-fourth and 
sixty-fifth years of our era. The execution of 
Christ by Pilate, as recorded by Tacitus, occurred 
about thirty-five years previously. This Christ, 
who was honored in Rome in a manner so tran- 
scendent ; in a manner which, on the showing of 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 63 

Tacitus, resembled the honor paid to a God, had 
lived only so long before. Whatever time is re- 
quired to account for the phenomenon of Christ- 
worship, on such a scale and with such intensity, 
is rigidly confined within thirty-five years. If 
legend was accumulated ; if incident was exagge- 
rated ; if fable was invented ; if a real individual 
was invested with a garment of myth; if the 
popular imagination surrounded him with a halo 
and magnified Him into a Divinity ; if enthusi- 
asm contributed its colored fancies, fanaticism its 
distempered heat, and superstition its darker 
imagery, — the whole work had to be done in 
little more than the number of years which now, 
in 1862, have elapsed since the death of Walter 
Scott. 

Keeping these points well in view, let us see 
whether they will not lead us on to several im- 
portant deductions. 

In an age of penny newspapers, I premise, of 
circulating libraries, and of universal reading, we 
are apt to forget what a remarkable instrument 
the human memory really is. More than two 
thousand years ago, Plato expressed the appre- 
hension that a habit of receiving assistance from, 



64 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

and trusting to, written books, might enfeeble 
the mind. His remark is valuable as involving 
an expression of opinion by one who had, per- 
haps, heard the entire Iliad repeated by a rhap- 
sodist, to effect that the powers of the human 
mind, deprived of all literary aids, are well fitted 
for thought and recollection. Numerous illustra- 
tions will occur to the reader, casting light and 
countenance on Plato's observation. Italian 
story-tellers repeat long scrolls of their country's 
poetry. The ballads of a people descend, as the 
minstrelsy of Scotland descended, in substantial 
correctness, generation after generation. A Da- 
sent, inquiring into the tales of Norway, and 
comparing them with similar tales elsewhere, 
finds that the popular memory, acting in branches 
of related kindreds parted for a thousand years, 
retains circumstances and occurrences with such 
minuteness that the identity of a tale which has 
crossed the Himalaya and Ural mountains, skirted 
the icy solitudes of the north, and arrived finally 
in the green valleys of England, can be distinctly 
traced. When the human mind is conscious that 
a prized treasure is confided to its sole custody, 
— when memory is its own book, — the charac- 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 65 

ters are clearly impressed, and the clasps which 
bind the whole are strong as iron. 

A small work, recently published by an able 
minister in the north of Scotland, furnishes an 
illustration in point. It purports to be an account 
of the most remarkable preachers in Ross-shire 
during the last century and the commencement 
of the present. Many of the men described had 
been dead sixty or eighty years. But passages 
from their sermons, notes of their conversation, 
incidents in their lives, clung to the popular re- 
collection. Handed from father to son, the very 
words they spoke survived ; and we find that, by 
simply transferring to his page the popular remi- 
niscences concerning them, the author has pre- 
served for us several well-marked and indubita- 
bly accurate portraits. 1 

Now, the Person after whom the vast multi- 
tude in Rome called themselves — the Person for 
whose sake they endured contempt, detestation, 
ferocious cruelty — the Person whose influence 
had extended, not through a district or a parish, 
but from the remotest outskirt of Rome's domin- 

1 The Fathers of Ross-shire. By Kev. John Kennedy. 



66 THE TESTIMOXY OF CHRIST 

ion to the capital of the empire — had, I repeat, 
been dead considerably less than forty years. 

May we infer anything with certainty, from 
the statement of Tacitus, as to what Christ had 
been ? 

The Christians were, Tacitus informs us, a sect. 
They held a particular religion, or, as he calls it, 
a superstition. The "Author of the sect" was 
Christ. Knowing the state of society in Judea 
at the time when, as Tacitus declares, Christ 
lived and died in that country, we can easily 
and confidently form an idea of the manner in 
which the sect of Christians was called into 
existence. The popular instruction of the age 
was almost exclusively oral. Having no period- 
ical literature, and almost no books, the popular 
mind, burning with the unslaked thirst for knowl- 
edge, turned eagerly to whatever sage, prophet, 
or other teacher held out promise of light. Christ 
had been some instructor of this kind, true or 
false. Gibbon, in fact, assumes that He was a 
"teacher," seer, or magician. And as the sect 
took His name, found in His name their definite 
and comprehensive characterization, and shrank 
from no suffering for His sake, it is absolutely 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 67 

certain they would seek to know as much of 
Him as possible, and would do their best to re- 
tain the memory of His words and sayings. 

What advantages had they for attaining this 
object? Let the answer be solemnly and ear- 
nestly weighed. Every man who had passed 
the age of thirty-five when Nero was putting 
to death that "vast multitude" of Christians, 
had been a contemporary of Christ. This, too, 
in an age when memory was in all its freshness, 
and when thirty-five years stood for a far shorter 
period in the chronology of mind than in our 
hurrying, excited, changeful days. The Chris- 
tian Church, in the capital of the empire, would, 
besides, be a church of some note ; and any one 
who had seen and heard Christ would be hon- 
ored and listened to by its members. The Jews 
were a wandering people, and there might be 
causes urging men who had mingled in the audi- 
ences of Christ to quit Judea. It can scarcely 
be conceived possible, therefore, that there were 
not, among the Christians of Rome to whom in 
Nero's time Christ was dearer than life, certain, 
if not many, who had seen and heard Him. But 
the fact that a vast multitude believed in Christ, 



68 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

in Rome, in Zero's time, demonstrates that mul- 
titudes believed on Him in other parts of the 
empire ; and the intensity of Christian faith in 
Rome would be no more than a fair test of its 
intensity in other places, including Judea. In - 
brief, the words and deeds of Christ were of in- 
finite concern to multitudes in the land of His 
activity, and in the centre of the intelligence of 
the world, while millions of His contemporaries 
were alive. 

Imagination is a powerful faculty; but in this 
case it was curbed by stern restraints. The re- 
collection of any man, who had impressed his 
contemporaries as the Christ of Tacitus palpably 
had impressed His, would be keen and vivid in 
the popular mind for at least a hundred years. 
It would be so in our own time, and we can 
scarcely conceive how much more likely it was 
to be so at the commencement of our era. The 
crystals of memory would for such a period con- 
tinue angular in their forms, brilliantly vivid in 
their tints. 

Say not vaguely that these Christians held it as 
a first duty to honor Christ, and that the play of 
imagination would be sanctioned and promoted 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 69 

by reverence. Before reverence for Christ could 
urge men to build Him a temple of allegory, be- 
fore the feeling was created which sets imagina- 
tion to her airy work, the executed malefactor of 
Tacitus had to be transformed into an object of 
unmeasured esteem, of infinite veneration. Men 
do not construct myths in honor of known male- 
factors ; and thirty-five years after Christ died as 
a malefactor, " a vast multitude " of men called 
themselves by His name, and died for His sake, 
in Rome. 

It is now recognized by strong thinkers that 
imagination and the allegorizing faculty could do 
little towards such a result. It is no special ten- 
dency of mankind to regard the universe as a 
" lyrical drama," or to take the belief which rules 
intellect and moulds character from "a witty alle- 
gory or a graceful lie." "No. " Think," asks one 
who has never fairly pressed his question to its 
issue in relation to Christianity, "would we be- 
lieve, and take with us as our life guidance, an 
allegory, a poetic sport ? Not sport, but earnest, 

is what we should require It seems to me 

a radical perversion, and even ^wversion of the 
business, to put that forward as the origin and 



70 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

moving cause," which " was rather the result and 
termination. To get beautiful allegories, a per- 
fect poetic symbol, was not the want of men; 
but to know what they were to believe about 
this universe, what course they were to steer in 
it, what in this mysterious life of theirs they had 
to hope and to fear, to do and to forbear doing. 
The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory, and a 
beautiful, just, and serious one ; but consider 
whether Bunyan's allegory could have preceded 
the faith it symbolized! The faith had to be 
already there, standing believed by everybody. 
.... Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, 
never risked their soul's life in allegories." 1 It 
was a serious matter for a Christian in the time 
of Nero to have made a mistake about Christ. 
Unless the crucified malefactor was what Chris- 
tians at this day believe Him to have been, death 
by burning in the form of a torch at a public game 
would have been a terrific misfortune. Man's 
sovereign passion, the passion for truth, would in 
such circumstances come into play. What Christ 
said and did would be of more practical and ear- 
nest interest than a pretty or pathetic tale con- 

l Thomas Carlyle. 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 71 

cerning Him. And if the Christian, who was to 
seal his profession in a death of studied tor- 
ments, preferred truth touching Christ to fancy, 
there were thousands, there were hundreds of 
thousands, of Christ's contemporaries alive to 
whom reference might be made. 

We now leave Tacitus. Turning to those 
Christians of whom he spoke, we find, at the 
earliest period when their own voice becomes 
audible in history, that they have four records 
of the life of Christ to which they attach su- 
preme importance. These are the Evangelical 
narratives we now possess. They are referred 
to by the early Christians as containing, in pure 
and authentic form, what they know of Christ. 
When we open them we discover that they are 
exactly such accounts of the Saviour as we 
should have expected Christians in the position 
of those mentioned by Tacitus to possess of the 
Founder of their religion. So long as the con- 
temporaries of Christ were numerous, and those 
who personally knew Him were frequently met 
with, the Christians of an age accustomed to oral 
instruction would seek nothing more than the 
concurrent statements of disciples of the Lord 



72 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

and His earliest followers. But when the ranks 
of Christ's contemporaries had been thinned by- 
death, the words and facts on which Christian 
faith and hope depended would be committed 
to manuscript and carefully preserved. Pre- 
cisely at such a time did the Gospel narratives 
arise, and they are manifestly and literally a 
transference to manuscript of such words and 
facts from Christ's life as we must conclude the 
Christians of Tacitus to have known. They 
are collections of sayings, discourses, and occur- 
rences, which could not have been heard and 
seen without leaving a vivid impression on the 
memory; and they are preserved with the amber- 
like clearness and crystalline decision with which 
the mind in an unreading age retains intense im- 
pressions. One of the four, — our fourth Gospe], 
— while substantially corroborating the others, 
is characterized by a spiritual apprehension of 
Christ which may not have been attained by the 
common run of His auditors. But the three first 
Gospels, commonly called the synoptical, consist 
precisely of what the multitude of Christ's hear- 
ers would carry away. There are speeches, such 
as the Sermon on the Mount : there are particu- 



TO CHRISTIAXITY. 73 

lar parables, as of the sower and the seed ; there 
are accounts of miracles, as of the feeding of 
five thousand, besides women and children, with 
a few loaves and fishes ; there are striking occur- 
rences, connected with particular words of Christ, 
such as the arrival of John's messengers to in- 
quire as to His Messiahship, and His express, de- 
liberate, detailed assertion of miraculous power 
in reply. These things are manifestly what 
memory, in an age like that in which Christ 
taught, could not fail to seize. Christ committed 
nothing to manuscript, but those parables, radi- 
ant with beauty, those thoughts penetrating to 
the heart's heart of every subject, those flashes 
of moral insight which light up the soul's inmost 
caverns with the candle of God, were an inef- 
faceable writing traced upon the memory of His 
generation. In Evangelist after Evangelist those 
things recur. There is just enough of diversity 
to obviate all idea of collusion ; there is that 
manifest identity which proves the impression, 
though made on many minds, to have been so 
well-marked and profound, that any play of 
imagination about its keen edges was impossi- 
ble. The authors of two of the Gospel accounts, 



74 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

the early Christians inform ns, were disciples of 
the Lord, ear-witnesses of His words, eye-wit- 
nesses of His deeds ; the authors of the remain- 
ing two were companions of disciples and of eye 
and ear witnesses. There is no reason conceiv- 
able that this should be false, and the circum- 
stances of the case render it inconceivable that 
it should not be true. We know from Tacitus 
that " a vast multitude " of Christians were en- 
during hatred and massacre for Christ's sake, 
while hundreds of thousands of His contempo- 
raries were aiive; and it is incredible that the 
persecuted should have let His contemporaries 
die out without having from them, in an endur- 
ing form, what they knew of Him after whom 
they called themselves Christians. 

The oral instruction, which was the New Tes- 
tament of the earliest Christians, committed to 
writing by those who knew it best, — the words 
and facts which fed the souls of those who, in 
Nero's time, were ready to die for Christ, gar- 
nered for their children and survivors by those 
who had companied with the Lord, — such is the 
first literature which we should have expected 
Christians to possess ; and such the Gospels are. 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 75 

It is an exhibition of mental confusion or culpable 
ignorance to launch forth into expressions of 
vague admiration in reference to their style and 
diction. Their literary qualities, strictly so called, 
are of no pre-eminent order. They possess, in- 
deed, one quality which, in literature as in life, is 
the basis of all excellence, — self-evident, unflinch- 
ing truthfulness. But they bear no trace either 
of wish or of ability to enhance the interest or 
impressiveness of what is related by the manner 
of relating it. Their authors have not thought 
of literary composition at all. They have not 
trained themselves to arrange their recollections 
in sequence of time or place. They feel only the 
unspeakable moment of what they have to relate, 
and their sole aim is to commit it intelligibly to 
manuscript. The fact that Jesus did this or said 
that is with them of such transcendent impor- 
tance that the question, when or where he spoke 
or acted, is, comparatively speaking, overlooked. 
Absolute certainty, absolute accuracy, perfect dis- 
tinctness, in putting down the syllable uttered, 
the deed done, by Christ, — that is their grand, 
absorbing aim. Thirty years of His life may be 
all but a blank; they offer no conjecture to fill 



76 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

up the gap. Certain of His sayings may give 
offence, certain of His doings may appear mys- 
terious. ~No matter. Their eyes saw them, their 
ears heard them, and they put them down. They 
do not write about Christ, they do not purposely 
draw the portrait, or describe the character, of 
Christ ; they transcribe from their memory what 
is vividly, indelibly imprinted there of Christ. 
Their connecting narrative is the gold of simpli- 
city, earnestness, integrity; but set in it, quite 
distinct from it, are the pearls and rubies of 
Christ's words and actions ; and it is as we con- 
tenrplate these that His image comes together, 
that His likeness dawns out upon us, that we are 
aware of a majestic, marvellous, God-like Person- 
ality, compared with whom all other historical 
characters flit swiftly back into insignificance. 

Plainly this is, in a strictly historical point of 
view, the most veracious account of one said to 
have been seen and known which the human 
mind can conceive. A formal delineation of 
character may be from the imagination ; a homo- 
geneous narrative, of equal excellence and pecu- 
liarity in every part, may be, from first to last, 
the product of ingenuity and invention : but if 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 77 

the character is presented by mere statement of 
fragmentary recollections, and if these fragments 
are of an altogether different quality and order 
from the narrative in which they appear, the con- 
clusion that they were derived from a living Per- 
son is inevitable. The Evangelists write as truth- 
loving, plain-minded, ordinary men ; they give us 
no gleams of insight into nature's beauty, no apt 
and beautiful parables, no profound and far-reach- 
ing truths : but once Jesus opens His lips, the 
page is illumined with colors of fairest poetry, 
enlivened with most exquisite apologue, radiant 
with keenest truth ; the lilies of the field beam 
out in a beauty eternally fresh; the companies 
of virgins, wise and foolish, advance with their 
lamps ; or Dives and Lazarus link heaven, earth, 
and hell together in their profoundest relations, 
in one or two magnificent strokes of dramatic 
imagery, — and truths which, after thousands of 
years, are the guiding stars of spiritual civiliza- 
tion, break upon the intellectual vision. 

We can now understand the extraordinary 
phenomenon of a vast multitude in Rome calling 
themselves by the name of One who had been 
executed as a malefactor between thirty and forty 



78 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

years before, and being ready to die for Him. 
We find, as we should have expected, that His 
personality had impressed itself indelibly upon 
their minds ; and that they had ample and accu- 
rate information concerning Him. There were, 
we have seen, among them large numbers of 
Christ's contemporaries. The men who had 
been His disciples would be their chief authori- 
ties regarding Him. These, when they came to 
commit their recollections to writing, would 
know that there were thousands living who had 
seen and heard Him, and who could confirm or 
expose their statements. From the writings we 
can represent distinctly to ourselves the kind of 
teaching in relation to Christ to which the Chris- 
tians of the Neronic persecution listened ; and, 
from a consideration of their circumstances, as 
narrated by Tacitus, we can pronounce the writ- 
ings exactly such as they were likely, so soon as 
they felt writing on the subject to be necessary, 
to possess. 

It is scarcely necessary to observe that a long 
array of arguments, independent of any I have 
hinted at, might be brought forward to prove the 
historical character of the evangelical memoirs. 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 79 

The whole question might, for instance, be rested 
upon the absolute impossibility that the Christ of 
the Gospels should have been the product either 
of individual invention or of popular imagina- 
tion ; that such a portrait should have originated 
in anything but reality. I content myself with 
claiming from every reasonable mind the conces- 
sion that the words and acts of Christ, imprinted 
on the evangelical narratives, are irrefragably 
historical. 

What, then, is Christ's testimony to His own 
religion ? What, in brief, is the proof He offers 
that it is Divine ? 

We have its compendious statement in His 
own words. John Baptist had been thrown into 
prison. Naturally perplexed at such an inter- 
ruption of his ministry, and probably expecting 
an intervention by Jesus on his behalf, he sent 
messengers to Christ, to ask, point-blank, whether 
He was the Messiah or not. Jesus answered, 
" Go and show John again those things which ye 
do hear and see : the blind receive their sight, 
and the lame walk ; the lepers are cleansed, and 
the deaf hear ; the dead are raised up, and the 
poor have the gospel preached to them : and 



80 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended 
in me." These words are distinct and explicit. 
They are related with close coincidence by Mat- 
thew and Luke ; the occurrence which called 
them forth is likely to have happened ; they ex- 
actly suit its circumstances; and they are such 
as could not fail to have impressed themselves % 
on the minds of hearers. "We may be as sure of 
their having been uttered by Christ as if our ears 
had heard them. 

Two things are broadly discriminated in this 
statement by Christ of the evidence that He was 
the Messiah of God : first, possession of miracu- 
lous power ; second, proclamation of good tidings 
to the poor. In other words, He claimed Divine 
authority, because armed with Divine power, and 
preaching a gospel of Divine mercy and holiness. 

It will be necessary for us briefly but carefully 
to consider these two in their relation to each 
other. The truth concerning Christ's miracles, 
as taught, practically in deed and exjn'essly in 
word, by Himself, is not to be clearly and fully 
apprehended at a first hasty glance. It is a truth 
whose line is traced with Divine precision by the 
finger of the Saviour between the falsehood of 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 81 

two opposing extremes : that of the power-wor- 
shippers, on the one hand, and that of the power- 
despisers, on the other; that of those who view 
miracles as the sole attestation of Christ's mis- 
sion, and that of those who extenuate their evi- 
dential force and pronounce them mere teaching 
by example. This is the day of flying judgments 
and half-truths, and we must exercise patience 
and circumspection if we would gather up from 
the Gospels all that Christ taught on this matter. 
It is certain, first of all, that Christ never 
spoke of miraculous power as a mechanical, sen- 
sible test, by which He was prepared to extort 
belief in His mission. The devil is stated to 
have asked Him to perform a miracle, confiding 
in His Divinity ; the Jews demanded a sign that 
He was the Son of God ; in both cases He re- 
fused compliance. " An evil and adulterous gen- 
eration seeketh after a sign, and there shall no 
sign be given it." "Except ye see signs and 
wonders, ye will not believe." 

It is, in the second place, equally certain that 
Christ expressly, deliberately, consciously asserted 
His possession of miraculous powers. This fact 
is undeniable as it is important. We saw that 

6 



82 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

both Jewish and Pagan opponents of Christi- 
anity had heard of Christ as one laying claim 
to supernatural power. The Gospels represent 
Him on every page as exercising such power. 
Miracles are no brilliant embroidery wrought on 
the plain web of the evangelical narrative ; they 
pervade it, warp and woof. There is miracle 
at Christ's birth and at His baptism ; He com- 
mences His ministry with miracle ; we hear of 
multitudes bringing sick and maimed to Him, 
and having them healed; He repeatedly raises 
the dead; He again and again feeds large num- 
bers by preternatural provision, and refers in ex- 
press terms to this form of miraculous exertion ; 
He dies amid the sublime terrors of miracle; 
and He rises miraculously into the sky when re- 
turning into heaven. We have just quoted from 
His own lips the declaration that He raised the 
dead. If anything is known of Christ at all, it 
is known that He broadly and distinctly asserted 
His possession of miraculous power. 

It is, in the third place, beyond question that 
Christ attached a strictly evidential character to 
His miraculous works. The sceptre of God's 
creative power is not so holy or so august as 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 83 

the word of His mouth ; but it is sacred and 
august, and it can be borne only in the hand to 
which God commits it. Christ referred to His 
mighty works as aggravating the guilt of the 
cities which rejected, and the men who reviled 
Him. He did more. He solemnly declared 
those works to be God's testimony in His be- 
half: "The works that I do in my Father's 
name, they bear witness of me." In one word, 
the miracles of Christ were manifestations of 
that creative power by which God has from time 
to time suspended the law of nature, " in re- 
gard," as Bacon grandly says, " of the work of 
redemption, which is the greater, and whereto 
all God's signs and miracles do refer." 

Considering all this, is not the loose talk of 
certain sentimental apologists for Christianity 
on the subject of miracles deeply surprising? 
"Loose talk," rather than positive error, but 
marvellously obliterative of the exquisitely-de- 
fined lines of truth in reference to miracle traced 
by the hand of Christ. "Any conversion" writes 
one, " or adhesion to His cause, xohich rested 
rather on the impression produced by superhu- 
man power than on the acceptance of the truth 



84 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

in the heart, icas studiously repelled by our Lord 
Himself." Mark how the tender precision of 
Christ's statement of truth in regard to mira- 
cle is blurred by this sweeping assertion. He 
would no doubt have deemed it nobler, higher, 
more Christian in Thomas to believe without 
ocular and tactual demonstration ; but was 
Thomas "studiously repelled?" Did Christ re- 
pel the Jews when He bid them believe, if for 
nothing else, " for the very works' sake ? " And 
what are we to say of " studious repulsion " in 
such a case when we find Christ directing the 
messengers of him who had been His forerunner 
to tell John that " the blind received their sight, 
the lame walked, the lepers were cleansed, the 
deaf heard," as well as that " to the poor the gos- 
pel was preached?" Christ never repelled any 
sincere adherent, whatever the means of his con- 
version. He blamed no one for attaching infinite 
importance to His mighty works. He repelled 
only the blasphemy of superseding spiritual 
power by material, or the malice of demand- 
ing a sign, not in order to obtain conviction for 
a candid judgment, but in order to entrap Him 
who was addressed. 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 85 

There are men, plainly enough, who would have 
suggested some modification of Christ's message 
to John Baptist. Their intellectual and moral 
condition is too sublimated to brook the coarse 
machinery of miracle. It irks them to have to 
mention things like raising the dead and creating 
food for multitudes to ears scientific. Christ, 
however, conjoined the spiritual and the material 
evidence of His mission; and what Christ joined 
together Christians ought not to put asunder. 
Nay, may there not be some to whom it is cause 
for inexpressible gratitude that the miraculous 
evidence of Christianity has been joined with the 
spiritual ; that a Power has been revealed inde- 
pendent of physical law ; that through nature's 
mysterious music has pierced the still, small, 
mighty voice of God ? Had nature been forever 
the same, and had there been only nature, — no 
change from season to season, from age to age, 
from aeon to aeon; the autumn wind sounding, 
the thunder booming, ocean rolling and roaring 
forever, — would not the fingers of the Most 
High have seemed to stiffen and draw back from 
the harp of nature ; would not the eternal mono- 
tone have become oppressive and overpowering ; 



86 TESTIMONY OF CHRIST TO CHRISTIANITY. 

and would it not have passed, at last, into a long, 
low wail of despair, — moaning, eternally, that 
there is no God ? There may be those of spirit 
so exalted and faith so strong that a moral les- 
son would have satisfied them that Christ spake 
from God; but there are others who will rejoice 
that He suited His proofs of His Divine mission 
to John in prison, and to Thomas after the dark- 
ness of Calvary had shadowed his soul. 

Be this as it may, the fact is historically indu- 
bitable that Jesus Christ said that He raised the 
dead, as well as preached a gospel of celestial 
healing to the poor. The assertion makes a 
large demand upon our faith. Let us inquire 
whether its falsity or incorrectness would or 
would not be a greater miracle than its literal 
accuracy. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE POSSIBLE HYPOTHESES CONCERNING CHRIST'S 
TESTIMONY TO HIS OWN RELIGION. 

It is my hope to be able to show in these chap- 
ters that Christianity must be true ; that the par- 
ticular evidence adduced in its favor not only 
annihilates every theory hitherto proposed against 
it, but makes any tenable theory on that side in- 
conceivable, thus absolutely shutting up the can- 
did mind to accept it. I can, with more or less 
effort, realize the state of mind which takes ex- 
ception to other parts of the argument for Chris- 
tianity ; but I am incapable of imagining any man 
impartially, comprehensively, and calmly weigh- 
ing Christ's historical attestation to His Divine 
mission, and concluding it to be unsatisfactory. 
Under these circumstances, I am sincerely desir- 
ous that the case of the skeptic should be stated 
with all possible advantage to him. Skepticism 
has, within the last eighty years, changed its 
ground ; but it is no necessary consequence that 



88 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

the position it now occupies should be weaker 
than the old. It would insult the intelligence 
and education of the time, infidel as well as 
Christian, to entertain the hypothesis of the 
Paine school, that Jesus was a vulgar impostor, a 
mere selfish deceiver, or crazy enthusiast. But 
no department of literature has been cultivated 
in the last half century with more signal effect 
than that which is devoted to the delineation of 
human beings acting under peculiar circumstan- 
ces, and endowed with peculiar characters. The 
rude and hasty theories which found in Cromwell 
a designing hypocrite, and in Mohammed a 
greedy, hypochondriacal, harebrained quack, have 
given way before finer analyses of character. 
The shades by which deception and self-decep- 
tion, fanaticism and roguery, enthusiasm and 
craft, superstition and scoundrelism, melt into 
each other, — shades as subtle as those by which 
a great painter blends his tints, — have revealed 
themselves to a more exquisite observation. A 
Cagliostro and Joe Smith, believed in by thou- 
sands, and probably believing, to some extent, in 
themselves ; a Robespierre, possessed, beyond all 
doubt, with a martyr-like devotion to the cause 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 89 

he believed to be true and beneficent, and led by 
it to the armpits in blood; effects of imagination, 
phantasy, and intense excitement on the bodily 
frame, previously unsuspected; phenomena of 
animal magnetism and the power exerted by one 
human individuality over another, unknown in 
former times : these, and things like these, have 
prepared us for more mysterious developments 
of human character and personal influence than 
were dreamed of by our fathers. Discussions of 
the character of Christ, and of possible hypothe- 
ses of the origin of Christianity, like those of 
Paley, consummately able as they are, have 
ceased to be satisfactory, or at least exhaustive. 
It is time to inquire whether some species of de- 
lusion or deception too subtle for Paley's analy- 
sis, — some well-intentioned weakness, some freak 
of religious enthusiasm, some refinement of pious 
fraud, — was not, after all, the originating cause 
of Christianity, and gives the key to the charac- 
ter and history of Christ ; or whether, with all 
our knowledge of history and of the human heart, 
with our complete knowledge of biography, and 
in the full blaze of science, we are still shut up to 
the conclusion that, as sure as man is man and 



90 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

truth is truth, Jesus of Nazareth was what he 
called himself. 

Every hypothesis that Christ was not the Mes- 
siah sent from God must admit of being classed 
under one of three heads, — imposture, delusion, 
or a mixture of the two. I shall endeavor to 
draw out a theory accounting for Christ's tes- 
timony, such as might be more or less vaguely 
realized by the cultivated skepticism of the pres- 
ent day. 

A Jewish peasant is born in the reign of Tibe- 
rius, of pious, simple-minded, somewhat super- 
stitious parents. The period is that at which the 
night of Roman despotism is settling over Judea; 
but old prophecies have taught the people to look 
for a deliverer to arise, like the God-sent heroes 
of old, scattering the darkness from the brow of 
Israel, replacing the garment of sackcloth with 
the purple of empire, and making Zion the crown 
and the glory of the world. The family into 
which the child is born traces its origin to the 
house of David, and nourishes in obscurity a 
pride becoming the heirs of kings. The child's 
mother, a tender-minded enthusiast, has dreams 
and fancies about the time of his birth. He is 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 91 

called Jesus on account of some imaginary por- 
tent. He is of a meditative, dreamy, enthusiastic 
disposition, with considerable intellectual capaci- 
ty, and high religious impressibility. His mother's 
hints, the circumstances of his country, the ru- 
mors of prophecy about to be fulfilled, encompass 
him, from his earliest years, with an atmosphere 
of emotional and imaginative excitement. He 
develops the strength and intensity of character 
which have often belonged to enthusiasts. Those 
about him feel the spell of his intensity, and the 
maniac quails before his glowing and steadfast 
eye. He acquires, by instruction or observation, 
some simple knowledge of medicine ; he travels 
into Egypt, and sounds the deeps of necromancy. 
His kinsman John, a more demonstrative, fiery, 
but far less profound nature, arrives at the belief 
that there is something mysterious and great 
about him. His mother had long since cherished 
the same idea. John begins to preach and bap- 
tize, and impresses powerfully upon the imagina- 
tion of Jesus that he is an extraordinary person- 
age, by publicly announcing the fact to the people. 
Gradually the belief is fixed in his mind that he 
is the Messiah. He begins to preach. His pre- 



92 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

scriptions to sick folks he finds accepted as mirac- 
ulous formulas, and epileptic or maniacal patients 
are calmed and quelled by his glance. A persua- 
sion of his superhuman power enhances the pop- 
ular effect of his teachings, and he is not careful 
to counteract the impression. Gradually he 
admits the belief that miraculous gifts are com- 
mitted to him, and is himself as ready to be 
deluded as the crowd. He cannot now relinquish 
the claim to supernatural power without losing 
credit. A subtle element of deceit mingles with 
his delusion. He winks at trickery got up by 
disciples or friends. His spoken instructions 
retain meanwhile a high moral tone, and his im- 
aginative genius clothes his utterances in a fas- 
cinating garb of parable and poetry. He is 
popular with the commonalty, but does not move 
the influential portions of society, and is too 
acute not to perceive that, under these circum- 
stances, he would have no chance in a contest 
with Rome. The opposition of the magnates of 
the nation at last triumphs over him, and he dies 
on the cross. 

This, or something like this, is the theory by 
which most rejecters of Christianity in the pres- 



TESTIMONY OF CHRIST TO CHRISTIANITY. 93 

ent day explain to themselves the extant records 
of Christ's career. It may be possible to con- 
struct the hypothesis more plausibly, and I invite 
skeptics to put their ingenuity to the strain on 
the subject. The gist of all such theories must 
be," that Christ was a singular, perhaps unex- 
ampled type of the moral enthusiast; that he 
deceived himself as well as others; that, when 
consciously deceitful, the fraud was pious; and 
that, after all deductions are made on account 
of what his age, nation, and circumstances led 
him into, he will remain worthy of respect and 
admiration. 

The way to test the truth of this or any similar 
hypothesis will be by full and candid analysis of 
the moral and intellectual character of Christ. 



CHAPTER V. 

was Christ's testimony false? — his moral 
character. 

It has been shown that Christ explicitly and 
consciously declared Himself possessed of super- 
natural power. That power embraced walking 
upon the sea, stilling the tempest, feeding com- 
panies of four and of five thousand with a few 
loaves and fishes, and raising the dead. I pro- 
ceed to inquire whether, from the moral charac- 
ter of Christ, it would, or would not, have been 
a greater miracle than these that, in asserting 
Himself to wield creative power, He lied. 

It is, first of all, a remarkable circumstance, 
touching the moral character of Christ, that the 
testimony of thoughtful and earnest men, ior 
nearly two thousand years, may be pronounced 
unanimous in its favor. The effect of the ap- 
pearance of Christ in the world has been to 
impress mankind with an idea of transcendent 



TESTIMONY OF CHRIST TO CHRISTIANITY. 95 

purity. "Which of you," said Christ to those 
who opposed Him in Judea, " convinceth me of 
sin ? " They were dumb. The question was put 
nearly two thousand years ago, and the response 
is yet awaited. Skeptic after skeptic has glared 
into the character of Christ, searching for a flaw ; 
and skeptic after skeptic has recoiled with the 
confession that, whatever Christianity might be, 
this Jesus of Nazareth was honest and pure. No 
character known to history has been subjected to 
scrutiny so piercing as that of Jesus Christ ; and 
there is no character known to history, except 
His, of which moral perfection could for a mo- 
ment be maintained. The proudest names in 
the annals of philosophic morality are tarnished. 
Zeno preached a stoical virtue; Diogenes was 
cynically fierce against shams ; but Zeno and 
Diogenes were personally immoral. Socrates is 
the loftiest and purest name of antiquity; but 
suspicions have in all ages been entertained in 
reference to the personal morals of Socrates, of 
a kind which never, even in imagination, dark- 
ened the figure of Christ. Aristotle and Plato 
were high-minded, in some sense spiritually- 
minded, men; but who does not know that if 



96 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

Plato and Aristotle were our moral guides, we 
should recede at once to something like a Mor- 
mon standard ? Cato the elder was one of the 
most respectable of Roman moralists, but he 
rose not above the cast-iron type of Roman vir- 
tue. His goodness was a narrow, intense, im- 
placable patriotism. His celebrated demand for 
the destruction of Carthage was inhumanly, 
fiendishly cruel, and his treatment of his slaves 
that of a man whose heart was stone. The best 
thing I ever heard of him is related by Horace, 
— mero caluisse virtutem^ — that the repulsive 
old savage mellowed his virtue with wine. Mo- 
hammed was a sincere reformer ; but the highest 
that can be said of him is, that in certain points 
he aimed at the Christian model, while in others 
he fell infinitely beneath it. The veneration 
with which several generations have regarded 
Luther and Calvin is profound; but what Pro- 
testant would declare the character of either to 
have been flawless? Space does not permit me 
to illustrate this point further, nor can it be con- 
sidered necessary that I should do so. It is be- 
yond doubt that no being has yet appeared in 
human form whom the suffrage of the race has 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 97 

pronounced so pure, so holy, as Jesus Christ. 
A beam -of white radiance, pure as the light 
of God's throne, proceeds from His eye, falling 
along all succeeding ages. May we not ask 
whether men could have recognized this ray as 
so pure if there had mingled in it originally 
an emanation from the spirit of evil — a con- 
scious deception, a lie ? Every record, sacred 
and profane, which we have of this Jesus, de- 
clares Him to have said that He could raise the 
dead. 

It is of high practical importance to observe 
that there has been, in recent times, no change 
in the estimate formed of the character of Christ 
by earnest, thinking men, even though they have 
not accepted Him as God's Messiah. 

"If the life and death of Socrates," said Rous- 
seau, " were those of a sage, the life and death 
of Jesus were those of a God." " The morality 
of the gospel," said the same writer again, " and 
its general tone, were beyond the conception of 
the Jewish authors ; and the history of Jesus 
Christ has marks of truth so palpable, so strik- 
ing, and so perfectly inimitable, that its inventor 
would excite our admiration more than its hero." 



98 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

With this has agreed the opinion of the great- 
est of those contemporary or almost 'contempo- 
rary thinkers who, if I must not call them infi- 
del, would not permit me to call them Christian. 
Fichte, the noblest representative of recent pan- 
theistic speculation in Germany, a man of superb 
intellectual vigor and impassioned devotion to 
truth and purity, bore Christ the highest testi- 
mony which it is possible for a German meta- 
physician to bear to any one — namely, pro- 
nounced Him an unconscious promulgator of 
the Fichtean philosophy. Jesus Christ, accord- 
ing to Fichte, was carried, by the mere purity 
and elevation of His character, into that region 
of transcendental and eternal morality to which 
a few other minds have risen only after long phi- 
losophic study and musing. He, a Jewish peas- 
ant, did, besides, says Fichte, more than all the 
philosophers in bringing heavenly morality into 
the hearts and homes of common men. The 
philosophers had sects and coteries ; His follow- 
ers were nations and generations. Fichte had 
that marvellous strength of wing in the open 
sky of speculation which characterizes the Ger- 
mans ; but his power was by no means so great 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 99 

in walking along the common earth and investi- 
gating plain facts. Had his practical capacity 
equalled his speculative power, he must have 
been brought to a dead halt by the question, 
How this Jesus, whose stainless moral character 
made Him the representative of purified hu- 
manity, could have falsely asserted that He had 
raised the dead, and fed five thousand on some 
morsels of bread and fish? Had Fichte fairly 
confronted this question, he might have passed 
beyond mere admiration for Christ's moral char- 
acter to the exclamation, "My Lord and my 
God!" 

Goethe was the universal genius of modern 
Germany, and is believed by many to have been 
the greatest man who has appeared in Europe 
for several centuries. He calls Christ "the Di- 
vine Man," "the Holy One," and represents Him 
as the pattern, example, and model of humanity. 

~No thinker of the first order, since Goethe, 
has dissented from his estimate of Christ's moral 
character. Mr. Carlyle, his great follower in Eng- 
land, has always referred in terms of profound 
reverence to Christ. The life of the Saviour is in 
his view a " perfect ideal Poem." " The greatest 



100 TIIE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

of all heroes," he says, " is One whom we do not 
name here ! Let sacred silence meditate that 
sacred matter." Deliberate lying on the part of 
Christ he would reject as a monstrous and incon- 
ceivable hypothesis. 

Yet the only Christ known to history broadly, 
constantly, deliberately, asserted His power to 
heal the sick, cure the blind, raise the dead. If 
He did not say that He possessed this power, 
we may shut up the volume of history, since it 
can certify no fact ; if He said it, can we imag- 
ine Him to have said it falsely? If He said it 
truly, was He not, and is He not, the Son of 
God? 

But, after all, the most important attestation 
to the moral excellence of Christ is to be found 
in the portrait of Him presented in the evangel- 
ical histories. 

It is, as we saw, a portrait artlessly drawn, 
with no parade of applausive adjective, no elab- 
oration of exalting color. It is not a formal 
portrait at all. The disciples put down Christ's 
words as they remember them, His deeds as they 
witnessed them, and the result is the Jesus of the 
New Testament. What, then, do we find in the 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 101 

Christ of the New Testament? I shall touch 
briefly upon the Gospel delineation, leaving read- 
ers to follow out the subject for themselves. 

Christ's entire conception of His Messiahship, 
in the first place, is that of a moral and spiritual, 
not a material, work. There was nothing in the 
circumstances of His time or nation to lead Him 
to this. The prevalent religious ideas were for- 
mal and external, and the subjection of the Jews 
to the Romans tended to throw into prominence 
the idea that the expected deliverer would be, 
like the old deliverers of the people, a man of 
war. But whatever Christ's hopes or intentions 
were, it is plain that He rested all upon moral 
renovation. The Sermon on the Mount, indubi- 
tably historical, places this forever beyond doubt. 
Through the innumerable obstructions and ob- 
scurations of the time, He penetrated to the cen- 
tral and eternal truth — that healing for a nation 
can only be of the soul, the conscience, the char- 
acter. Take away the moral element of Christ's 
teaching, and what remains? The whole has 
vanished. False religions turn entirely on cere- 
monies and performances ; His was spirit and 
truth — these and nothing else. The sacraments 



102 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, apart from 
their moral significance, could attract no imagi- 
nation. Can we conceive a teacher, whose doc- 
trine was thus profoundly and pervasively moral, 
binding it up with a falsehood? The Jews looked 
for signs and wonders : true ; but Christ con- 
fronted prejudices and prepossessions of the na- 
tion every whit as powerful as this, and why 
should He give way here alone ? Miracles in- 
creased the power of His preaching : doubtless ; 
but He could rebuke the vague longing to see 
a sign. If ever there was a teacher who would 
have dispensed with miracles unless they were 
true, that teacher was Christ Jesus. 

In the second place, a distinctive characteristic 
of Christ's teaching is its insistence on sincerity. 
His words go always direct to the heart. The 
external action was to Him but a sign. The 
chastity He requires is of the eye and the soul; 
He reads the guilt of adultery in a glance. The 
love He values is not what cries Lord, Lord, but 
what wells from the secret places of the heart. 
The benevolence He extols is of the widow's 
mite, not of the trumpeted donation. Other 
teachers have smoothed all difficulties for prose- 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 103 

lytes, and have been severe upon sinners who were 
not among their own followers ; Christ sent back 
the plausible mammon-worshipper who offered 
Him allegiance, with a requirement, stern indeed, 
but no more than testing : — "Sell all thou hast." 
Thy words are unexceptionable; thy intentions 
seem good ; thy conscience accuses thee of no 
tolerated sin: "Sell all thou hast." Had the 
man's heart been right, he would have done it. 
But falsehood, of whose presence he appears to 
have lost consciousness, was lurking beneath all 
his plausibilities, and Christ went straight to that. 
The woman taken in adultery, on the other hand, 
He does not condemn. He sees only the foul 
hearts and sanctimonious faces of those who 
accuse her, and flashing the torch of conscience 
upon each, He sends them back in convicted dis- 
may. 

But why should the vain attempt be made to 
catalogue perfection, or to name the virtues of 
Him in whom all virtues met? Of what moral 
excellence was he not a type ? Surrounded by 
bitter enemies, He wept that they would not let 
Him fold them under the wings of his love. 
Alone in the world — solitary in working out a 



104 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

mighty purpose, and in bearing an unspeakable 
sorrow — separated, even humanly speaking, by 
thousands of years, from sympathy and under- 
standing — He never faltered in His patience, He 
never wavered in His long-suffering, He never 
flinched in His Divine fortitude. While none 
understood Him, He perfectly understood all, He 
made allowance for all. Anger He felt, but it 
was visibly the anger of a God, the scorching 
flash of Divine holiness upon sin ; anger for un- 
kindness, for carelessness, for disrespect, to Him- 
self, never. When the traitor was coming with 
his band, and those who should have guarded 
Him were asleep, there was no sterner rebuke 
than " Could ye not watch with me one hour ? " 
When Judas was already at hand, it was only, 
"Sleep on now, and take your rest." To love 
God supremely, to love one's neighbor as one's 
self, — this was the rule He prescribed to His 
disciples, and His life was its absolute fulfilment. 
"This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well 
pleased ; " such was the testimony of God con- 
cerning Him. " He hath done all things well ; " 
such was the fond and wondering attestation by 
men that they could require no more of Him. 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 105 

No vice that lias a name can be thought of in 
connection with Jesus Christ. Ingenious ma- 
lignity looks in vain for the faintest trace of 
self-seeking in His motives; sensuality shrinks 
abashed from His celestial purity; falsehood can 
leave no stain on Him who is incarnate truth; 
injustice is forgotten beside His errorless equity ; 
the very possibility of avarice is swallowed uj) in 
His benignity and love; the very idea of am- 
bition is lost in His Divine wisdom and Divine 
self-abnegation. 

And yet this Jesus, who defines the devil as 
" a liar," who has the clearest consciousness that 
a lie is the very essence of evil, tells the Jews 
that God the Father witnesses for Him, the form 
of that witness being the mighty works done by 
Him. 

Were those mighty works a deception? Did 
the words in which Christ searched into motive 
and pierced the subtlest hypocrisy go like dag- 
gers through His own heart ? That is the ques- 
tion. There is no evading it. History has heard 
of no Christ who was not a miracle-worker. 
Jews and disciples, Christians and infidels, Mat- 
thew and Luke, Celsus and Julian, all know 



106 TESTIMONY OF CHRIST TO CHRISTIANITY. 

Christ as one who constantly, and for years, de- 
clared Himself able to raise the dead. Can 
human concef)tion embrace the very thought that 
He was lying? ~No. The conscience and the 
intellect of the race start back appalled at the 
imagination of a miracle so stupendous. The 
crushing of all the stars into powder in one grasp 
of God's hand would not be such a miracle. 

Was He, then, mistaken ? The answer in- 
volves analysis of His intellectual character. 
That analysis will form the principal part of our 
subject, — principal, not in importance, but in 
having been less fully performed than analysis of 
His moral character. The intellect of Christ — 
considered merely as that of a man — I regard as 
the most marvellous known to history. 



CHAPTER VI. 

WAS CHRIST'S TESTIMONY MISTAKEN? — HIS INTEL- 
LECTUAL CHARACTER. 

Be it granted that the influence of religious 
enthusiasm is strange and subtle, and that most 
religious impostors have been self-deceived. Cag- 
liostro, though decidedly a scoundrel and quack, 
had probably a confused, dreamy, superstitious 
notion that he did, or at least might, possess 
superhuman powers. The Mormon prophet, 
though the hypothesis of crafty knave dove- 
tails remarkably into his history, may have been 
bewildered by the success of his own schemes, 
and the reverence of devotees, into a kind of 
conviction that he could do mighty works. But 
it hardly admits of doubt that both these were 
deliberately and consciously dishonest. It is a 
notable fact that honest and manly characters, 
though inflamed in the highest degree with re- 
ligious enthusiasm, have not been betrayed into 

107 



108 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

the fancy that they possessed miraculous power. 
Mohammed lived in a barbarous age, among a 
barbarous people, and announced himself as the 
prophet of God, commissioned to overturn the 
religious institutions of his nation. He was a 
vehement enthusiast; his imagination luxuriated 
in descriptions of the bliss of Paradise ; his 
words, compared with those of Christ, are as 
the wild flashings of a torch to the serene and 
steady burning of a lamp. But Mohammed was 
never deluded into the belief that he could work 
miracles. He expressly declared that he could 
not. A striking illustration of the fact on which 
I insist is furnished by the biography of Edward 
Irving. His mind was violently heated by en- 
thusiasm. He believed implicitly in the visions 
and revelations of the enthusiasts by whom he 
was surrounded. But he was an upright man. 
Even in his aberrations he was a powerfully- 
minded man. The result was, that, while won- 
dering that privileges were not vouchsafed to 
him similar to those of the persons in whom 
he believed, he never imagined that he was 
supernaturally gifted or visited. It has been 
proved that Christ was morally sound. It has 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 109 

been shown that even infidels recoil from the 
startling impossibility of His perpetrating a trick. 
Was His enthusiasm, then, so uncontrollable, or 
His intellectual faculty so weak, that He was be- 
guiled into delusions from which common sense 
guarded Mohammed and Edward Irving ? Was 
His mind so strangely clouded, so hotly imagina- 
tive, that He believed Himself not to have seen 
a vision, or heard a voice, not to have healed one 
or two sick persons or calmed one or two mani- 
acs, but to have cured blindness, deafness, lame- 
ness, leprosy, for years, by word or touch, — to 
have walked on the sea, — to have fed large mul- 
titudes with a few loaves and fishes, — to have 
dried up a tree with His rebuke, — to have, on 
several occasions, recalled the dead to life ? The 
answer I shall be able to render is, that the 
Christ who laid claim to all this possessed the 
most clear, balanced, serene, and comprehensive 
intellect known to history. 

Observe, first, that what may be called the 
temperament of Christ was of the kind sj)ecially 
opposed to enthusiasm. Personally pure and pas- 
sionless, He was under no temptation similar to 
those to which strong animal natures — such 



110 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

men, for instance, as Mohammed and "Joe 
Smith " — are exposed. His soul was celestially- 
pure from sensual taint ; His religion is, accord- 
ingly, the least sensual of all religions. But this 
very purity — this heaven-like spirituality of mind 
— lays one open to another danger, the danger 
of asceticism. It is a danger so subtle and so 
potent, that no religious development known 
among men has escaped both the sensual snare 
and the ascetic. Between these false extremes, 
all earth-born religions, and all corrupt forms of 
the Divine religion, have oscillated. Christians, 
when left to themselves, soon abandoned the 
golden mean. Age after age, the human minds 
which drank in most deeply the purity of Chris- 
tianity were overcome by the beautiful and pa- 
thetic delusion, that while on earth men can eat 
angels' food — losing themselves in light, forget- 
ting that it is to the rough music of duty and 
work that we must here walk, and floating off in 
trances of luxurious spirituality. But Christ was 
no more an ascetic than a sensualist. He set His 
brand upon polygamy, but gave no encourage- 
ment to celibacy. It was a robust virtue He 
taught, a virtue with foot firm planted on the 



TO CHRISTIANITY. Ill 

earth, a virtue arrayed in battle harness and 
stained with battle dust. 

Christ's manner of life, again, was genial, soci- 
able, broadly and healthily human. He partook 
in the natural enjoyments of life. He provided 
wine for a marriage feast. He sympathized with 
music and dancing to welcome back prodigals. 
He provoked the sneer of His adversaries that 
He "came eating and drinking." Things ap- 
peared to Him in their true relations, through 
the clear eye of sense. 

This is of all dispositions the least liable to 
delusion. The coincidence of such a disposition 
with the imagination of possessing power to 
raise the dead and to create food for multi- 
tudes, would be a more singular effect than the 
creation of a world. The human mind fails ab- 
solutely to conceive it. Jesus Christ was no 
shrieking fanatic, no dreaming visionary; His 
yea was yea, His nay, nay; His every percep- 
tion was steady, clear, and calm. When He 
told the messengers of John that He raised the 
dead, He knew what He was saying as well 
as the most scientific head of the nineteenth 
century. 



112 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

Remark, next, with what lofty and comprehen- 
sive discernment Christ rose above the erroneous 
ideas formed by His own disciples of His king- 
dom and His work. They were apt to kindle 
into fanaticism, or to break into intolerance ; He 
retained ever the serenity of perfect wisdom, of 
perfect charity, of perfect self-command. They 
called for fire from heaven to burn uj) the Samar- 
itan villagers who rejected Him. In so doing, 
they fell, in point of fact, into the error of Mo- 
hammed when he grasped the sword to spread 
his doctrines. If men repel the Holy One of 
God, ought they not to be consumed ? Did not 
Elias call down fire from heaven to burn up the 
mockers ? A greater than Elias was there. New 
heavens of spirituality, opening in placid azure 
deeps far above the lightnings and thunderings, 
the clouds and storms, of the old dispensation, 
were now being revealed. " Ye know not what 
manner of spirit ye are of; for the Son of man 
is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save 
them. And they went to another village." 
Christ's unerring judgment condemned as en- 
tirely as His infinitely tender heart the hasty zeal 
of His disciples. They would have shut the 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 113 

mouth of every one not walking exactly in their 
footsteps. "Master, we saw one casting out 
devils in thy name, and we forbade him, because 
he followeth not us." Jesus recognized good in 
every form, and tolerated it under all drawbacks : 
"Forbid him not." They hankered after power 
and opulence; He not only rebuked, as satanic 
error, any such confusion between God and mam- 
mon, but abstained even from such delineations 
of the glories of a future state as might work 
upon the sensuous imagination. He trusted to 
truth ; to truth permeating the world as leaven 
permeates the lump ; to truth, growing slowly as 
the mustard-seed, but at last beneficently shelter- 
ing all the nations of the earth. Yet this same 
Jesus who so gently, calmly, and wisely com- 
posed the quarrels of His disciples, who checked 
their effervescing zeal, who knew at all times 
with the clearest consciousness that God's light 
of moral truth can, if God so wills it, dispense 
with the lightning of physical power to open its 
way or herald its advance, appealed to them on 
the miracles of feeding the'multitudes, took them 
to witness His raising of the dead, and left His 
impress upon their memories as that of one who 



114 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

constantly performed miraculous works. Could 
delusion so gross and pitiable have stolen upon 
an intellect so majestic in its calmness, so mighty 
in its power, so serene in its elevation ? 

It has already been pointed out that the purely 
spiritual conception formed by Christ of his own 
religion, tends to prove His perfect integrity. 
Less obviously, but with equal certainty, may it 
be argued that His intense and perpetual feeling 
of the moral and spiritual character of His re- 
ligion rendered it unlikely that He should glide 
into any delusion as to the possession of miracu- 
lous powers. He kept constantly before His 
hearers the idea of the spirituality of His work. 
His kingdom, He said, came not with observa- 
tion. In a series of marvellously beautiful and 
expressive parables, He indicated the gradual, 
spirit-like advance of His religion. It was to 
penetrate the mass of the world like leaven ; it 
was to grow silently, gradually, as a tree ; it was 
to use no weapon taken from the armories of 
earth. ~No man who has devoted any attention 
to psychological or biographical inquiries can fail 
to perceive that this conception, formed in an age 
like that in which Christ appeared, involved an 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 115 

exhibition of intellectual power unexampled in 
history. It is sublime — infinitely sublime. This 
Jewish peasant, wandering with a few poor me- 
chanics about the inland seas and bordering wil- 
dernesses of J udea, homeless as the bird of the 
air and the fox of the hill, His meagre retinue 
forced sometimes to appease their hunger by rub- 
bing out the ears of corn, rises to an apprehen- 
sion of moral and spiritual power transcending 
infinitely that of the rulers, the priests, the 
teachers of His nation, and of all the sages and 
philosophers of His time. This Jewish peasant 
looks upon the glories of antiquity, upon the 
mighty edifice of ancient civilization, and is plac- 
idly, immovably assured that the words of truth 
spoken by His mouth in remote Palestine will 
smite its pinnacles with the fire of God, and strike 
down its cloud-capped towers, and of all the 
fabric of its vision leave not a wreck behind. 

Readers may recall here the touching words in 
which Napoleon in St. Helena referred to Jesus 
Christ. It was this spirituality of the Saviour, 
His infinite superiority to the fierce and tempo- 
rary forces which move men and nations, His 
Divine impersonation of those serene and mighty 



116 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

powers, whose sphere is the spirit of man, whose 
agencies are the viewless influences of thought, 
— righteousness, mercy, truth, and love, — that 
amazed Napoleon. There, with the solemn ocean 
round him, and the silent sky above, the fierce 
passions which had so long raged in his heart 
growing still as the volcanic fires which once tore 
the heart of his lonely isle, he felt how the infini- 
tude of calm in the mind of Jesus overarched all 
the working and all the warring of men. Al- 
exander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon had 
founded empires, and they had passed away ; but 
the influence of Jesus Christ, gentle as of sun- 
light over volcanic flame, was still sovereign in 
the souls of millions. Napoleon in St. Helena 
thought that an irrefragable proof that Christ 
was Divine. 

But it is not with the sublimity, or even with the 
abstract intellectual sweep, of Christ's conception 
of His religion that we are immediately concerned. 
I would have it observed that His spiritual con- 
ception of His mission was peculiarly fitted to 
guard Him from delusion, if He had been gifted 
with no power superior to that of ordinary men. 
His nation looked doubtless for a miracle-working 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 117 

Messiah. But they looked also for a conquering 
Messiah, crested with victory, to bow down the 
necks of their enemies. Nay, more; their con- 
ception of the use and purpose of the Messiah's 
miraculous power was connected with their idea 
of His work. They thought that it would be 
used to smite down opposing hosts. They were 
perplexed to see Christ working miracles, and 
yet refusing to be made a king. They were per- 
plexed when he refused to exhibit a sign as a 
proof of His Divine mission. His conception of 
the use and purport of a miracle was as different 
from theirs as His conception of His kingdom. 
Alone, His miracles could not prove His mission : 
as mere signs by which sense might know God, 
He refused to work them ; those who would not 
believe without them, he put distinctly into a sec- 
ond place. He regarded them as a sublimely fit- 
ting, sublimely convincing, revelation of God's 
power side by side with the Christian revelation of 
God's holiness. And this was what not the Jews, 
not the multitudes, not even His own disciples, 
could comprehend. The people, we cannot doubt, 
were amazed and chagrined because He who could 
so plainly provision armies by a word, and blast 



118 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

legions as He blighted the fig-tree, would not be 
persuaded to accept a crown. John, disconsolate 
in prison, could not understand why the thunders 
were sleeping in the hands of Christ, why Herod 
was not struck dead with a glance, and the bonds 
of the forerunner torn from his limbs. His own 
family could not imagine why He kept His power 
always in reserve, why He did not rally Israel 
round their irresistible leader by doing all He 
could, and doing it openly. The passers-by at 
Calvary wagged their heads, and could not un- 
derstand how He who saved others could not 
save Himself. The miraculous power of Jesus 
was a problem and a mystery to all. His mother 
alone seems to have been led by perfect love to 
perfect, peaceful, spiritual faith : " Whatsoever 
He saith unto you, do it." Never man occupied 
so solitary a pinnacle of spiritual elevation as 
Jesus Christ. And can we imagine that He who, 
in prophesying the ultimate spread and conquest 
of His religion, said nothing of miracle, — who as 
a mere matter of fact can be shown to have had 
a profounder conviction of the might of spiritual 
miracle than any man who ever lived, — and who, 
in working miracles, refused to accommodate 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 119 

Himself to the cavillers of His nation, — that such 
a One dreamed Himself into the belief that He 
could feed thousands with a few loaves and 
fishes, still the tempest in its raging, and bid the 
the stone-cold corpse arise ? 

But I must hurry on, condensing material for 
volumes into one or two paragraphs. The reader 
must fill up by his own study the outline I en- 
deavor to set before him. 

Did it ever occur to him that the Christ of the 
Gospels is eminently shrewd and cool-minded? 
A weak and unwise reverence is apt, as was 
hinted, to prevent us from clearly and fully ap- 
prehending the many-sided character of Christ, 
and the effect takes place particularly in reference 
to qualities such as I now consider. The halo of 
moral light which surrounds Him obscures to us 
the robustness, the sharp-cutting vigor, the so- 
lidity, the acuteness, the adroitness, of His purely 
human understanding. His Gospel was the Gos- 
pel of love, but He was not in the least sentimen- 
tal. In the parable of the talents, the doom of the 
man who obtained but one and hid it in a nap- 
kin seems hard in comparison with that of his 
more favored fellows ; but it was just. The la- 



120 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

borers who worked the whole day had really- 
good (sentimental) reasons to urge why they 
should obtain a larger wage than those who 
wrought for only one hour ; but Christ knew that 
he " who does justice most shows mercy most," 
and even-handed, iron-browed justice decided. 
None of your maudlin sentimentalities : " Didst 
thou not agree with me for a penny ? I will give 
unto this last even as unto thee." The parable 
of the unjust steward reveals an exquisitely keen 
and alert appreciation of that self-helping shifti- 
ness by which men of the world often put to 
shame the sheepish simplicity of " the children of 
light." Christ could teach His disciples by the 
example even of an avowedly " unjust" steward. 
Observe, again, with what a fine, keen discrimi- 
nation He deals with different minds. Christ's 
mode of treating diversities of character is a com- 
plete psychological study. The deepest root of 
motive is as clear to Him as the topmost flower 
of action. Those who believe that He was the 
Son of God, and that He had a supernatural in- 
sight into the heart, may see little wonderful in 
His "knowing what was in men." But those 
who believe that He was a moralizing doctor, be- 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 121 

wildered into a notion that His cures were mirac- 
ulous, are bound to account for His perspicacity 
on the hypothesis that He was deluded in the 
matter of His supernatural power. Can any one 
be named in history, sage or practical man, whose 
discernment of the line of demarcation between 
weakness, even vicious weakness, and deep-lying, 
deadly sin, was so exquisite ? At first we may 
be startled — shallow minds have no doubt often 
been startled — by the contrasts by which we 
are here met. He has no sterner rebuke than 
majestic, upbraiding pity for the woman taken in 
adultery ; yet He will not permit a man to follow 
Him on condition of first burying his father. He 
checks Peter as if he were a devil, for suggesting 
that He should not die ; He has only a look of 
silent, appealing tenderness, when Peter denies 
Him with oaths. He drags out the greed and 
malignity which lurk behind the Pharisee's ex- 
postulation against the " waste " of the ointment. 
He demands the rich man's last penny as proof 
that he is sincere. In all these cases the princi- 
ple on which He proceeds is perfectly, eternally 
correct. For human weakness — compassion ; 
for repentance — mercy; for compromise be- 



122 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

tween God and mammon — for service of His 
Father or Himself, with a qualification — " Get 
thee behind me, Satan." Feebleness of constitu- 
tion may be tenderly dealt with ; cancer must be 
cut out. The sin of Peter was, strictly estimated, 
more deadly when, in crafty selfishness, he asked 
Christ to put away all thoughts of death, than 
when, in the tumult and terror of that appalling 
night, with fluttered nerves and fainting heart, he 
swore that he " knew not the man." Considera- 
tion of Christ's dealing with such cases has led me 
to believe that it was an intellectual perception 
which primarily determined His resj)ective meth- 
ods of rebuking Peter, when he said, " that be far 
from thee, Lord," and when he denied Him. I 
entertain the same opinion regarding His prayer 
on the cross, " Father, forgive them ; they know 
not what they do." No doubt, the magnanimity 
which rendered so clear an appreciation of the 
motive of His murderers at that moment possible 
testified to the highest moral nature the world 
ever knew. But the words express a fact. The 
executioners of Christ and the yelling crowd 
were but instruments in the hands of the chief 
priests and rulers ; they knew not what they did ; 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 123 

their sin was one of recklessness, of ignorance, of 
helpless stupidity, not the deadly, diabolical crime 
of the scribes and Pharisees. This affords the 
rationale of Christ's prayer; and the perception 
of this was an intellectual operation. At that 
awful moment, in the agonies of death, this God- 
like intellect acted with a calmness, a perspicacity, 
a faultless accuracy, such as in its serenest work- 
ing we might look for, and look for in vain, from 
the intellect of a Shakspeare. The reason of 
Christ's prayer touches upon one of the profound- 
est principles of social and political philosophy : 
that, since the multitude errs for the most part 
unconsciously, it is the part of a wise, just, and 
humane man not to hate, not to scorn, but to 
pity, to teach and to guide them. Yet, as sure 
as this Christ has been named by history, He pro- 
fessed to work miracles. 

Another illustration, or series of illustrations, 
of the collectedness and calm perspicacity of the 
intellect of Christ is afforded by His answers to 
those who approached Him with false and insidi- 
ous questions. If there is one capacity, more 
than another, characteristic of a wise, circum- 
spect, and steady mind, it is the power to com- 



124 THE TESTIMOXY OF CHRIST 

bine perfect truthfulness and perfect civility with 
refusal to yield any satisfaction to inquisitive in- 
solence, on the one hand, or to crafty malignity 
on the other. To lie is in all cases a sin ; to 
throw open the breast for every man to pry 
into, is required of none. The character of the 
Homeric Ulysses, as profoundly conceived by Mr. 
Ruskin, in the last volume of Modern Painters, 
depended, in its intellectual aspect, on capacity 
to withdraw at will every thought and purpose 
from the vulgar gaze. Homer deemed this a 
proof of pre-eminent intellectual power. Refer- 
ence is made to Ulysses solely, of course, to ren- 
der it unmistakable what kind of ability is now 
pointed out. The wisest of the Greeks had no 
care for truthfulness ; the answers of Christ, while 
transcending infinitely, in mere shrewdness and 
baffling ingenuity, the best uttered by the Greek, 
are at the same time immaculately truthful. Is 
it with an enigma, an intricate, puzzling case, that 
His enemies attempt to reduce Him to silence, 
and thus to humiliate Him before the people? 
Do they ask Him, for instance, how it will be in 
heaven with the woman married to seven breth- 
ren ? He removes the difficulty in a moment by 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 125 

envelojring the supposed case in a broader and 
more spiritual light than had dawned on their 
perceptions, and reveals at the same time a prin- 
ciple of universal and magnificent application to 
the relationships of humanity in time and in eter- 
nity. "In the resurrection, they neither marry, 
nor are given in marriage." That settles the 
whole matter. Has He to repulse a hypocrit- 
ical and malicious inquiry touching the authority 
by which He works miracles ? He achieves his 
purpose by jmtting the simple question whether 
the ministry of John was from heaven or of 
men. How perfect the appreciation of the char- 
acter and circumstances of His assailants this 
displayed — how completely the question posed 
and silenced them ! But the most wonderful of 
Christ's wonderful answers was given when He 
was asked whether it was lawful to pay tribute 
to Caesar or no : " Render," He said, " unto Cae- 
sar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God 
the things that are God's." This is the wisest 
answer mentioned in profane or sacred history. 
In the first place, it absolutely struck dumb those 
who sought to betray Christ into an expression 
of hostility to the Roman power. To have taken 



126 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

exception to it would have thrown them open to 
the charge to which they sought to expose Him. 
But while serving this first purpose, how marvel- 
lously rich are the words in significance and in 
truth ! They indicate a fact and a law as long 
and as broad as human history — that where the 
dominion of conscience begins, the dominion of 
the civil magistrate ends. They enunciate a 
principle to regulate the conduct of Christ's 
Church in all ages towards the civil authority, 
providing for the harmonious, mutually benefi- 
cial action of each in its sphere. They are an 
exhaustive formula of duty, political and reli- 
gious, — duty to God rising over and casting 
light upon duty to man, as the blue vault of 
heaven sjDans the green floor of earth. Think 
of the. amplitude of intellectual vision displayed 
in those words ; think of the delicacy of tact 
which applied them to the case in hand ; and 
then say whether the intellect which produced 
them had anything in common with that of the 
fanatic or visionary, or whether it is conceivable 
that it dreamed itself into a belief of possessing 
miraculous powers. 

But we have still to notice what is, I think, 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 127 

the most rare and, so to speak, original quality 
of the Saviour's intellect. I called it the calm- 
est and most perspicuous intellect known to his- 
tory, and I did so mainly because no human 
intellect has ever come near it in what may be 
called two-sidedness, in the habit and capacity 
of seeing a fact or a truth on every side and in 
every light. What I mean will be understood 
by reference to the human intellect which ap- 
proaches nearest in this respect to that of the 
Jesus of the Gospels, the intellect of Shak- 
speare. Readers must not be startled by this 
illustration. Christ as a whole can be compared 
with no man, and we are conscious of an infinite 
moral disparity when we compare Him with any 
mortal. But Christ's humanity was as real as 
that of any of us ; and though His moral nature 
was, from first to last, stainless perfection, His 
intellect grew in His mother's house, and was 
limited by His perfect humanity. We may, 
therefore, without irreverence, compare it with 
any of the supreme intellects of the human race. 
All good critics have enlarged on Shakspeare's 
comprehensiveness, impartiality, placid breadth 
and tolerance of intellect. His mind was "no 



128 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

twisted, poor, convex-concave mirror, reflecting 
all objects with its own convexities and concav- 
ities ; " it was " a perfectly level mirror ; " and in 
lordly procession, — with every lineament dis- 
tinct, — with light and shade distributed in just 
proportions over all, — kings, ministers, generals, 
peasants, mechanics, passed along it. This is the 
supreme proof of mental tranquillity, of mental 
health; and it is because of the measure in which 
Shakspeare exhibits it that he is recognized as 
the sovereign intellect of mere humanity. But 
the intellect of Shakspeare was not so calm in 
its poise, so nicely apprehensive of every side 
and aspect of a matter, so wide in range through 
all moods of sound natural feeling, as the intel- 
lect portrayed in the Gospels. Christ could use 
words of burning indignation and godlike scorn : 
"Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can 
ye escape the damnation of hell?" He could 
speak in terms of exquisite, pointed, perplexing 
irony; for so I interpret His words, when He 
told the scribes and Pharisees that they served 
themselves heirs to their fathers' cruelties against 
the prophets by rearing their monuments. His 
sayings and acts are the tenderest ever uttered 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 129 

or ever done : " Come unto me, all ye that labor 
and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest ; " 
" Suffer little children to come unto me, and 
forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of 
heaven;" "He beheld the city and wept over 
it ; " " He went about doing good." Every truth 
is seen by Him in its completeness; He utters 
no half-truths ; and the very greatest human 
intellects utter hardly anything else than half- 
truths. He proclaims His gospel as the gospel 
of peace : " Peace I give unto you, my peace I 
leave with you ; " but He knows that the path- 
way of truth and purity must be through the 
embattled squadrons of the powers of darkness ; 
and " Think not," He says, " that I am come to 
send peace on earth ; I came not to send peace, 
but a sword." He bids His disciples regard them- 
selves as blessed when evil is spoken against 
them by the world for His sake ; but He re- 
members how easily the human heart takes flat- 
tering unction to itself when justly blamed, and 
does not omit to say that the evil must be spoken 
"falsely." He ordains that alms shall be done 
in secret, and sternly condemns the trumpeted 
prayer of the hypocrite ; but He forgets not that 

9 



130 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

though villany may take the mask of virtue, vir- 
tue must still wear her frank smile and open 
brow, and commands His disciples to " let their 
light shine before men." He enjoins the wisdom 
of the serpent; He has no regard for devout 
maundering and pious ineptitude ; but the wis- 
dom He enjoins must be combined with the 
harmlessness of the dove. He denounces the 
substitution of scrupulous exactness in paying 
tithe of mint and anise and cummin, for the 
weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy and 
faith; but He leaves no opening for the idea 
that tender conscientiousness is to be despised; 
" These ought ye to have done, and not to have 
left the other undone." His eye embraces the 
balancings of the clouds and the courses of the 
heavens; it sees also the shadow cast by the 
daisy on the stone. Take one other instance of 
this transcendent calm, this all-comprehending 
tranquillity, perspicacity and justice, of the Sav- 
iour's mind. The scribes and Pharisees perse- 
cuted and afflicted Him during all the years of 
His ministry. Their hatred and malignity were 
infernal. At last they put Him to a death of 
torture. He was aware of their iniquity. He 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 131 

knew the evil of their example. But was He 
driven by all He knew of their wickedness, by 
all He felt of their animosity, one hairsbreadth 
beyond the line of absolute Tightness in His 
teaching regarding them? "The scribes and 
Pharisees," He said, " sit in Moses' seat ; all, 
therefore, whatsoever they bid you observe, that 
observe and do ; but do not ye after their works ; 
for they say, and do not." How perfect in wis- 
dom, how absolute in justice, how incomparable 
in moderation ! Am I not justified in saying 
that no intellect so clear, lofty, and placid as 
that of Jesus of Nazareth is known to history ? 

There is one other characteristic of Christ to 
be classed exclusively neither with the intellect- 
ual nor the moral powers, but tempering and 
beautifying both, which I must in no wise omit, 
— His habit of dwelling affectionately on the 
aspects of nature. In modern times we have 
seen admiration for the beauties and sublimities 
of natural scenery become a j^assion, and it may 
well be doubted whether, in fiery intensity and 
absorbing degree, it is always the symptom of a 
strong, balanced, or healthy mind. But in right 
quality and just measure it is, perhaps, a surer 



132 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

proof of moral health and intellectual complete- 
ness than any mental characteristic that could be 
named. It testifies to an openness to gentle, un- 
exciting influences, to a freshness of soul rejoic- 
ing in nature's dewdrops, to an innocence which 
can sympathize with the tender harmony of na- 
ture's joy. It evinces a delicacy of soul that 
would recoil with sensitive pain from guile, from 
malignity, from baseness. It may fairly be 
doubted whether any man retaining the child- 
love for green fields and morning flowers has 
ever been consciously and inveterately bad. In 
its noble form this love of nature is eminently a 
trait of Christian times. Paganism did not tone 
the mind finely enough for sympathy with na- 
ture's poetry. "I do not know," says Mr. Rus- 
kin, " that of the expressions of affection towards 
external nature to be found among heathen wri- 
ters, there are any of which the leading thought 
leans not towards the sensual parts of her. Her 
beneficence they sought, and her power they 
shunned ; her teaching through both they under- 
stood never." For a Christian man, on the other 
hand, "it is not possible," says the same great 
writer, " to walk across so much as a rood of the 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 133 

natural earth, with mind unagitated and rightly- 
poised, without receiving strength and hope from 
some stone, flower, leaf, or sound, nor without a 
sense of a dew falling upon him out of the sky." 

Now the Person who introduced this finer in- 
fluence into life, this gentler music into civiliza- 
tion, was Jesus Christ. Those of His followers 
in Judea who knew of His habitual retirement 
"to the mountains for prayer, His temptation in 
the desert of the Dead Sea, His sermon on the 
hills of Capernaum, His transfiguration on the 
crest of Tabor, and His evening and morning 
walks over Olivet for the four or five days pre- 
ceding His crucifixion, were not likely to look 
with irreverent or unloving eyes upon the blue 
hills that girded their golden horizon, or drew 
down ujDon them the mysterious clouds from the 
depths of the darker heaven." And Christ ex- 
alted our whole conception of nature by habitu- 
ally associating it with the spiritual instruction 
of man. He made the wind God's minister to 
raise the mind of Nicodemus to a conception of 
the Spirit's influence ; He quickened the Chris- 
tian energies of His disciples by pointing to the 
fields whitening to harvest ; He marked the flut- 



134 TESTIMONY OF CHRIST TO CHRISTIANITY. 

tering wings over the stony uplands round the 
Galilean lake, and drew a warning for the frivo- 
lous and the fickle in all ages from the devouring 
of the seed by the birds and the withering of the 
shallow-rooted corn. While nature, in its beauty 
and hallowed suggestiveness, was ever present 
with Christ, He showed no trace of the ecstasy 
of mere indolent contemplation. He never 
paused to lay on the colors of the scene-painter. 
Nature He viewed as made for man ; her illumi- 
nated lettering He used to impress upon man the 
lessons of Divine wisdom ; the lilies of the field 
were to be considered, in their monitions to hu- 
mility, in their lessons of trust in God, in their 
gentle yet most expressive satire on regal glory 
and gorgeous apparel. 

All this attests a state of perfect mental health, 
a settled calm of power and peace, a still and 
placid elevation of soul, infinitely beyond reach 
of any cloud or any wind by which the clearness 
of the intellectual eye might be dimmed or its 
calmness fluttered. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE COMBINATION OF MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL 
EXCELLENCE LN CHRIST. 

After what has preceded, it is like trying to 
enlarge the infinite to seek further evidence that, 
in affirming Himself to have raised the dead, 
Jesus Christ neither spoke falsely nor fell into 
mistake. It is, however, certain that we can 
never, by considering moral and intellectual qual- 
ities apart, arrive at any just conception of their 
united action ; and we must, therefore, endeavor 
to form some faint idea of their combination in 
the mind of the Saviour. 

The intellectual and the moral elements of 
mind have a reciprocal influence. Intellect never 
works so powerfully as in alliance with moral in- 
tegrity ; and conscience has no such auxiliary as 
mental power. In a mind of feeble capacity the 
moral sense is always at a disadvantage. Enthu- 
siasm steals around it like a humid mist, diffract- 

133 



136 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

ing its beam, and dyeing it with a thousand col- 
ors ; or error is subtly insinuated into the oil by 
which its light is fed ; or the vapors of unquelled 
phantasy take shape of gigantic realities, and its 
ray falls in ghastly illumination on the wild dance 
of extravagance or delirium. Intellect clears 
and stills the mental atmosphere, so that the 
flame of conscience burns bright and steady. It ' 
brings discretion to take the hand of zeal, and 
knowledge to open her eyes ; it furnishes reflec- 
tion to temper the fire of passion, and sagacity to 
use it ; it penetrates deception, detects error, sug- 
gests method, and preserves moderation. Intel- 
lect discerns the relations of things, so that con- 
science may apportion duty to each. Intellect 
puts the stake in the ground, so that the flower 
of moral feeling, which otherwise would be drag- 
gled in the mire, may run up it into light. Right 
moral qualities, on the other hand, are the guar- 
dian angels of intellect. They elevate its aims. 
They dash from its lip the heady wine of vanity 
and conceit. They avert the deadlier intoxica- 
tion of pride. They protect it from the danger 
that lurks in every form of self-seeking. 

Now we have seen that the character of 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 137 

Christ's mind was superlative excellence, both 
intellectual and moral. The subtlest delusion 
creeping in would have been seen and smitten 
by the keen light of His intellectual vision. The 
most delicately plausible, the most tenderly dis- 
guised, of pious frauds, would have been pierced 
by the Ithuriel spear of His moral purity. In 
such a mind intellectual sight and moral intui- 
tion would be combined in one act of infallible 
reason, of reason poising itself as perfectly, float- 
ing as free, as a winged seraph in the air of 
heaven. Hence that Divine self-command and 
self-possession of Christ; that never-agitated re- 
pose ; that calm, God-like majesty. He is never 
sudden, never partial, never impatient ; His path 
is as the path of a star, — the Morning Star. 
His words, His actions, are simply, absolutely 
right. As we revolve those words and actions, 
a natural association seems to lead our thoughts 
to sublime and solemn objects, — the cloudless 
sky, the slumbering ocean, the everlasting hills. 
We feel ourselves unable to say that one excel- 
lence is more conspicuous in Him than another ; 
all good havings, moral and intellectual, combine 
in Him into a serene perfection for which we 



138 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

can find no name, unless it be of that ineffable 
Wisdom by which the crowned sage designated 
Christ of old. 

Among the heedless sayings of skepticism, one 
of the most heedless, yet not least plausible, is, 
that the Eastern mind differs from the Western 
in an imaginative vagueness and superstitious 
credulity. These, it is said, obliterate the lines 
which separate fact from phantasy, and dispose 
to the wholesale acceptance of wonders. The 
miracles of Christianity, it is concluded, were 
but part and parcel of the airy architecture of 
Oriental poetry. Such are the arguments with 
which some content themselves, as they turn 
lightly away from the ladder of Divine revela- 
tion let down by God out of heaven, and declare 
it to be but a dream. How slight the effort of 
consideration required to prove the entire falla- 
ciousness of such reasoning! The Jewish peo- 
ple, first of all, were markedly different from 
every other Eastern race. No nation ever was 
more practical. Amid the vagaries of Oriental 
polytheism they held firm the belief in one God ; 
and for eighteen hundred years, though scattered 
and peeled, with nationality destroyed and seep- 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 139 

tre broken, they have shown themselves capable 
of being pitted in the arena of commerce, of 
science, of art, and of literature, with the most 
robust and sharp-minded Western races. The 
Jews have been a gold-dust among the nations 
of modern Europe, a gold-dust which will one 
day be gathered into the crown of humanity. 
Christianity, in the second place, was, almost 
from the first, a thing of the West. It had 
not received its name when it was taken up by 
the acute Greek intellect ; a few years after the 
death of Christ it was accepted in the city of 
Rome ; it has since appeared too definite, prac- 
tical, and calmly wise to be retained in purity by 
the Asiatic mind ; but it " is still," as says Gib- 
bon, "professed by the nations of Europe, the 
most distinguished portion of human kind in 
arts and learning as well as in arms." The 
most complete refutation, however, which can 
be conceived of this thoughtless sophism, is de- 
rived from a consideration of the exact balance 
of all powers in the Saviour's mind. Christ's 
parables and similitudes are clothed in no Ori- 
ental drapery ; they have a chaste simplicity and 
clear-cut distinctness, which ally them to the 



140 TESTIMONY OF CHRIST TO CHRISTIANITY. 

most exquisite poetry of ancient Greece and of 
modern Europe. In intellect, as in every human 
characteristic, Christ belongs not to a nation, but 
to mankind; He is the second Adam, the type 
of perfect humanity. 

Is it not, then, I ask once more, incredible and 
inconceivable that this Christ should have said 
that He raised the dead without having done 
so? 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE SEALING OF CHRIST'S TESTIMONY BY HIS DEATH. 

The bearing of Christ's death upon His testi- 
mony to the Divine origin of His religion can be 
briefly stated. His crucifixion was an infinitely 
solemn ratification of all He had asserted. This 
will become evident when we consider two points 
in connection with it. 

In the first place, His death was manifestly 
contemplated by Him as a part of His ministry 
and priesthood, and, as such, distinctly foreseen. 
Consistently with the pervading spirituality of 
His views of His mission, He regarded His death 
as completing its lessons, filling out its moral sig- 
nificance, and crowning its mighty purpose of 
wisdom and of love. Of this there is indubita- 
ble proof in the fact that three Evangelists nar- 
rate His prediction of His decease. It is not 
necessary for our argument to suppose that, in 
uttering this prediction, He put in exercise a 



142 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

supernatural power of foreseeing events. To 
an intellectual eye like Christ's, all-embracing in 
its range, all-penetrating in its clearness, it is 
difficult to know how much of the page of the 
future would necessarily lie bare. The thing to 
be observed is, that while proclaiming doctrines 
of celestial purity and self-evidencing truth, and 
while distinctly affirming His supernatural power, 
He calmly informed His disciples that His own 
death was embraced in the purpose for which He 
came into the world. It was as if He had said : 
— "The words I speak, taken in conjunction with 
the life I lead, are proof that I come from God ; 
the works I do are a further attestation by God 
the Creator that I am from Him; and in testi- 
mony that I put my own trust in this witness, 
in testimony that I believe the words I speak to 
be God's words, and the works I do to be God's 
works, I shall lay down my life." Imagination 
can conceive no stronger proof of sincerity. 

In the second place, the manner in which 
Christ went to death was conspicuously in ac- 
cordance with this view of His decease as con- 
firming all testimony previously given by Him 
to the Divine origin of His religion. Our infor- 



TO CHRISTIAXITT. 143 

mation as to His death is peculiarly ample. All 
the Evangelists dwell upon it. "The fulfilment," 
says Ellicott, " of type and shadow, of the hopes 
of patriarchs, of the expectations of prophets, 
yea, and of the dim longings of a whole lost 
and sinful world, must be declared by the whole 
evangelistic company; the four streams that go 
forth to water the earth must here meet in a 
common channel; the four winds of the Spirit 
of Life must here be united and one." And in 
each of the narratives of Christ's trial and cruci- 
fixion there is one broad and well-marked char- 
acteristic. They all represent Jesus as preserving 
a mental state of perfect calmness, a demeanor 
of absolute self-possession. He cannot but have 
known, from the moment of His arrest, that the 
implacable malignity of the rulers and Pharisees, 
and the blind fury of the mob they hounded on, ' 
would compass His death. Men say that in 
immediate prospect of decease the whole events 
of a past life flit in distinct colors and vivid out- 
lines before the mind ; and whether this is gen- 
erally the case or not, it is impossible to read the 
narrative of the Saviour's trial, and to observe 
the calmness and clearness of His answers, with- 



144 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

out feeling that every occurrence of His minis- 
try must have then lain under the perspicuous 
glance of His recollection. At that moment, He 
must have been distinctly conscious that He had 
professed to raise the dead, to still the tempest, 
to create food for multitudes, to open the eyes 
of those born blind. In the glare of confronting 
death, how completely would He have felt every 
plausible sophistry of pious fraud, every fond de- 
lusion of imagined power, to be shrivelled up ! 
But He never faltered. He was what He had 
declared Himself to be from the beginning. 
When He was weak as a lamb in the hands 
of its destroyer, when the arm of His Father 
was restrained, when no angel-hand was present 
to wipe His blood-stained brow, His faith that 
He had bid the winds be still, and the dead start 
up alive, was as firm as when the multitudes cast 
their garments in His way, and hailed Him as 
the King of Israel coming in the name of the 
Lord. That is a fact — a plain, historical fact. 
Four witnesses attest this attitude of Christ be- 
fore His accusers, and the wildest credulity of 
skepticism must shrink from the idea that four 
men have existed in this world who could have 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 145 

drawn four such pictures as that of Christ in His 
trial and crucifixion, if there had been no orig- 
inal for the portrait, no actuality for the occur- 
rence. And if Christ died as the Evangelists 
represent Him as dying, can words be found 
strong enough to express the confirmation thus 
afforded to all He had previously declared ? 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE TESTIMONY TRUE. 
$ I. The Miracles. 

It will be interesting now to glance back upon 
that strange trial by proxy, on strength of which 
Hume so unceremoniously dismissed the mira- 
cles of Christianity, and to take up in detail the 
mighty works, whose evidence that acute and 
grave philosopher pronounced superior to the 
evidence of the wonders wrought by Christ. 
Hume's cases of apparently demonstrated, but 
confessedly false, miracle are three in number. 
Let us take them up in succession. 

First : Tacitus reports of Vespasian that he 
cured in Alexandria a blind man by means of his 
spittle, and a lame man by the touch of his foot. 
The cures took place " in obedience to a vision 
of the god Serapis," who enjoined the sufferers 
to have recourse for aid to the Emperor. Ves- 
pasian, argues Hume, was a man of "gravity, 

146 



TESTIMONY OF CHRIST TO CHRISTIANITY. 147 

solidity, age, and probity;" Tacitus was a con- 
temporary writer, candid, veracious, penetrating, 
and leaning rather to skepticism than credulity ; 
the persons who informed him of the circum- 
stances, presumably sensible and veracious, were 
eye-witnesses, and had no motive for falsehood ; 
the facts themselves were of a public nature. 
Could evidence, he asks in conclusion, " well be 
supposed stronger?" Yet was the whole affair 
" a gross and palpable falsehood." 

Is it dishonest art or felicitous artlessness 
which runs through this whole statement ? 
Was Hume's acuteness at fault, or his cunning 
in exercise, when he left absolutely out of con- 
sideration the point on which the whole matter 
depends? The witnesses were probably guilty 
of no falsehood ; Tacitus had no intention to 
deceive ; Vespasian did not lie : but what of the 
deus ex machina, the god Serapis, whose inspira- 
tion put the entire business afloat ? An Emperor 
on a royal progress would not do so unpopular a 
thing as disoblige a local divinity. Vespasian's 
retinue saw what appeared on the surface, and 
veraciously reported the same. But Serapis, — 
what of Serapis? Was it quite beyond possi- 



148 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

bility that the priests of the Egyptian divinity 
should avail themselves of the presence of the 
Emperor to do a stroke in trade ? It is painful 
to reflect, in reference both to Hume and the 
priests of Serapis, that the character of the lat- 
ter is not above suspicion. The Romans of the 
middle of the second century were no rigid mor- 
alists ; but when the worship of Serapis was in- 
troduced about that time into the city, it proved 
so abominable as to be put down by the senate. 
Now, it happens that blindness and lameness are 
specially easy of simulation. The priests of Ser- 
apis — the god, by the way, was only a bull — 
could have had both these maladies acted to 
perfection, by Alexandrian street beggars, for 
the matter of two half-crowns. Surely, such 
being the case, it is childish to talk of the ex- 
istence of proof that the men were either blind 
or lame. It is not impossible that the Vespasi- 
anic cure of lameness by touch of the foot might 
be used with good effect in the streets of Lon- 
don. It would have been instructive as well as 
interesting to know whether the Emperor wore 
a boot, and to what part of the person he applied 
the healing kick. 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 149 

But there is something else in this Serapian 
miracle which will arrest an observant eye. The 
blind man was cured by the application of " spit- 
tle." It is on record that another miracle was 
performed on a blind man in a manner exactly 
similar. And just about the time when Vespa- 
sian made his progress through Egypt, the priests 
of Serapis would be much plagued by the prog- 
ress of the religion founded by Him who per- 
formed that other miracle. It was a shrewd 
speculation, that if the bull ordered, and the 
Emperor performed, a mighty work resembling 
one narrated in the Gospels, the thing would 
tell against Christianity. "No intelligent man 
will hesitate to pronounce this the origin of the 
whole affair. 

Of these Vespasianic wonders Hume speaks as 
among " the best attested miracles in all profane 
history." And he is probably right, 

Hume's second well-attested false miracle is 
that related by the Cardinal de Iletz, "When 
that intriguing politician," says Hume, " fled into 
Spain, to avoid the persecution of his enemies, 
he passed through Saragossa, the capital of Arra- 
gon, where he was shown, in the cathedral, a man 



150 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

who had served seven years as a doorkeeper, and 
was well known to everybody in town that had 
paid his devotions at that church. He had been 
seen for so long a time wanting a leg, but recov- 
ered that limb by the rubbing of holy oil upon 
the stump; and the cardinal assures us that he 
saw him with two legs." I have put in italics 
the very obvious explanation of this " miracle." 
The limb had been shrunken or paralyzed. By 
rubbing with oil its use was restored, and the oil 
happening to have been "holy," the fact was 
accepted as a miracle. The man, I observe, had 
rubbed his leg with the oil. Had he been in 
quest of a miracle, had he not looked for a nat- 
ural effect, he might have poured the sanctified 
liquid upon the stump, or, in fact, would have 
had recourse to the cheaper, and, in miraculous 
respects, I presume, equally efficacious remedy, 
holy water. Persons with stiff legs might do 
worse than try rubbing with Saragossa oil, holy 
or profane. 

Hume's third case remains. It is not, like 
the others, simply absurd, and will repay a rather 
more careful consideration. 

"There surely never was," he observes, "a 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 151 

greater number of miracles ascribed to one per- 
son than those which were lately said to have 
been wrought in France upon the tomb of Abbe 
Paris, the famous Jansenist, with whose sanctity 
the people were so long deluded. The curing 
of the sick, giving hearing to the deaf and sight 
to the blind, were everywhere talked of as the 
usual effects of that holy sepulchre. But, what 
is more extraordinary, many of the miracles were 
immediately proved upon the spot before judges 
of unquestioned integrity, attested by witnesses 
of credit and distinction, in a learned age, and 
on the most eminent theatre that is now in the 
world. Nor is this all. A relation of them was 
published and dispersed everywhere ; nor were 
the Jesuits, though a learned body, supported 
by the civil magistrate, and determined enemies 
to those opinions in whose favor the miracles 
were said to have been wrought, ever able dis- 
tinctly to refute them." 

Hume has an easy way of accounting for all 
this. Lies! lies! lies! "It is nothing strange, 
I hope," says the philosopher, with an amiable 
smile, "that men should lie in all ages." Hume 
has great confidence in man's power of lying. 



152 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

A lie is the devil's talisman, with which this 
philosopher opens all the secret doors of his- 
tory. The events said to have occurred at the 
abbe's tomb were, he conceives, absolutely im- 
possible or miraculous. What then ? Why, the 
" cloud of witnesses " told lies. It is bootless to 
ask how or why ; the whole vaporous agglom- 
eration is dispelled by the keen, clear light of 
philosophy. 

Well-informed and thinking persons will hesi- 
tate in the present day to accept this explana- 
tion. Lies are prevalent to a lamentable extent, 
but there is such a thing in the human breast as 
a passion for truth. Cool, deliberate, intentional 
lying is less common than might be maintained 
by a Mephistopheles or a Hume. It is an inter- 
esting and suggestive fact, that, even in Hume's 
former cases, the testimony of the unbiassed and 
capable witnesses to the so-called miracles was 
sound. Vespasian, Vespasian's retinue, and Taci- 
tus, spoke what to them was truth. That one 
man apparently blind, and another apparently 
lame, did suddenly see and walk when the Em- 
peror, bidden by Serapis, operated upon them, is a 
historical fact. Lying came into play only in case 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 153 

of those who had an object in lying, to wit, the 
blackguard priests of Serapis. The canons of 
Saragossa were also, if credulous, not necessarily 
dishonest. A limping doorkeeper, who rubbed 
his leg with holy oil, regained, sure enough, its 
perfect use. We accept the fact, though we ques- 
tion the inference, and do not at once remit the 
cardinal and the canons, with the coolness of 
Hume, to the inspiration of the father of lies. 
Lying for the sake of lying, devil-worship out 
of pure, impartial, unadulterated reverence for 
that potentate, will, thank God, explain not quite 
so much in human history. 

In Hume's third case of false miracle, — that 
of the cures effected at the tomb of Abbe Paris, 
— there was, I believe, as little intentional false- 
hood as in the others. But this renders its ex- 
planation only a little more difficult. We know 
now, better than was known in the last century, 
that extraordinary bodily effects are produced 
by extraordinary mental emotions. The excita- 
ble French peasantry, on approaching the tomb 
of Abbe Paris, fell into transports of excitement. 
Their bodies were acted on by a force powerful 
as phrensy. Apparent and temporary, or even, 



154 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

in some cases, real cures, may have been pro- 
duced. When the tomb was rendered inaccess- 
ible, the ecstasies of emotion lost their occasion, 
and no more " miracles " were wrought. The ra- 
tional and satisfactory explanation of the affair 
is, that the occurrences were not miraculous. 
None of the cures mentioned by Hume were 
necessarily beyond reach of natural causes. 

Such are the most telling instances of recorded 
" miracle " which one of the ablest and best-read 
of infidels could bring into comparison with those 
of Christ. 

In turning to the miracles of our Lord, the 
change of which we are sensible is infinite. We 
have left the mist ; we stand upon the mountain. 

The works done are, to begin with, beyond 
conceivable reach of natural causes. Let us se- 
lect two of Christ's miracles as types: raising 
the dead; and feeding five thousand, besides 
women and children, with a few loaves and 
fishes. 

Remark, — the point is of importance, — that 
unless the power purporting to be miraculous 
has in at least one instance of its exercise been 
indubitably preternatural, it is only reasonable to 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 155 

believe the whole series of wonders explicable 
on natural grounds ; whereas, if an energy beyond 
question creative has once been put in exercise, 
it is a slight additional claim on our faith to 
demand belief in any number of what may be 
called secondary miracles. An alleged preter- 
natural cure of deafness or paralysis, performed 
by one who did no other wonderful work, may 
not unwarrantably be supposed a freak of nature 
or an ingenious fraud. But if it is absolutely 
demonstrated that such a One raised the dead 
or created food for thousands, we must regard 
the probabihty infinitely extended that His 
power included the healing of diseases. We 
know Him to have at command an energy by 
us inconceivable and incommensurable, — the en- 
ergy to which is referred the creation of worlds, 
— and we can be no longer surprised by any 
instance of its exercise. One miracle irrefra- 
gably proved, it becomes easy to believe whole 
dispensations of miracle. 

It is manifest that both the miracles here 
selected as crucial instances of Christ's wonder- 
working power are, if facts at all, facts of a su- 
pernatural character. To rekindle the spark of 



156 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

life in the clammy dead, to create the elements 
of human sustenance, — these are things indis- 
putably beyond reach of natural agencies. The 
question is whether they are proved ; and this 
question we are now in a position to answer in 
reference to Christ Jesus. 

We have for them not merely an external at- 
testation equal, perhaps superior, to that for any 
facts mentioned in history, but the explicit testi- 
mony of Christ himself. "The dead are raised 
up:" Christ spoke these words. That He did 
so, has been demonstrated. The miracle of feed- 
ing the multitude is similarly attested. Not only 
do all four Evangelists relate it, but two of them 
introduce Jesus expressly referring to it. In one 
word, we have, apart from all other evidence, in- 
dubitable proof that Jesus Christ said that He 
raised the dead and created food for multitudes. 

Let us clearly apprehend the peculiarity and 
importance of the personal testimony of Christ 
to His miraculous powers. "In appreciating the 
evidence for any events," says Mr. Baden Pow- 
ell, " of a striking or wonderful kind, we must 
bear in mind the extreme difficulty which always 
occurs in eliciting the truth, dependent not on 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 157 

the uncertainty in the transmission of testimony, 
but, even in cases where we were ourselves wit- 
nesses, on the enormous influence exerted by our 
prepossessions previous to the event, and by the 
momentary impressions consequent upon it." It 
may be difficult to observe a miracle, but it is 
easy to hear a word. There was nothing mirac- 
ulous, nothing "striking or wonderful" in the 
utterance by Christ of the declaration that He 
raised the dead. Witness after witness gives 
the very words in which He made this asser- 
tion. The fact that He existed at all is not 
more certain than the fact that He claimed mi- 
raculous power. It could be proved from profane 
history, if the Gospels had never been written. 
This, then, brings the possibility of falsehood or 
mistake within limits much more narrow than 
those contemplated by Mr. Powell. "I saw a 
man raising the dead : " but my nerves may 
have been fluttered, and my eyes may have de- 
ceived me. "I raised the dead; I created food 
for a multitude:" this is a very different affair. 
The evidence of my consciousness, — the evi- 
dence I have that I move this limb or speak 
this word, — the evidence I have of my personal 



158 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

identity, — is now added to the external evidence 
of sense. The possibilities of mistake are really- 
very limited. A sane man is not likely to believe 
himself able to recall the dead to life ; and it 
would be an unprecedented caprice of imagina- 
tion which led one to fancy that he had sup- 
plied food to a vast number of persons if he 
had given them nothing. The alternative is de- 
liberate lying. . 

"Deliberate lying." I must once more beg 
the reader to observe that this is a far rarer 
thing in connection with real or fancied miracle 
than was once generally supposed. "" Man every- 
where is the born enemy of lies," says a nobler 
and profounder skeptic than Hume ; and the re- 
sults of mature science and of minute historical 
investigation coincide with this proud witness 
of the heart. We saw that, in the testimony 
to Hume's so-called miracles, there was hardly a 
trace of conscious falsehood. Mr. Baden Powell 
mentions, in his contribution to " Essays and Re- 
views," a number of instances in which skeptics 
once believed men alleging wonders to have lied, 
but in which the truthfulness of human testimony 
is now vindicated. The supposed miracles have 



TO CHRIS TIANITY. 159 

been resolved into natural phenomena, but the 
witnesses are absolved of falsehood. The won- 
ders related by Marco Polo were deemed incred- 
ible. The miracle of the martyrs who spoke 
articulately after their tongues were cut out was 
thought a lie. The two thousand persons who 
declared that they saw an angel in the air at 
Milan were presumed to be knaves or fools. The 
miraculous balls of fire on the spires at Plausac 
were laughed at. The story of Herodotus about 
the bird in the mouth of the crocodile was sup- 
posed to be a clever embellishment of his narra- 
tive, invented by the picturesque Greek to tickle 
his Olympian audience. But it is now known 
that the excision of the whole tongue does not 
take away the power of speech. It is now 
known that the angel at Milan was the aerial 
reflection of an image on a church. It is now 
believed that the Plausac balls of fire were elec- 
trical. Herodotus and Marco Polo were no liars. 
What is the first legitimate conclusion from all 
this ? Is it, as Mr. Powell decides, that we must 
believe in the " universal subordination of phys- 
ical causes? that we must recognize the absolute 
certainty that every sensible fact has a physical 



160 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

explanation? No. The first and the most im- 
portant deduction to be drawn from these and 
similar cases is, that, in accounting for prodigies, 
the hypothesis of conscious lying goes but a lit- 
' tie way. In connection with all those false mir- 
acles, the witnesses were not false. Had men 
been bold to say for ages, "We shall believe that, 
in all these cases, the laws of nature were sus- 
pended, rather than that so many persons were 
deliberate liars," the procedure would have been 
wise, noble, and correct. The inference that na- 
ture is capable of explaining more things than is 
commonly supposed, is, in the second place, per- 
fectly just. Mr. Powell had the best right to ap- 
ply to Christ's miracles whatever physical cause 
might explain them. But if he found the exclu- 
sion of natural cause palpable and indubitable, 
he was bound to admit that all experience only 
added to his reasons for accepting the testimony 
of honest men concerning them. 

The supremely wonderful thing, after all, both 
in Hume's and in Baden Powell's treatment of 
the question of miracle, is the profound uncon- 
sciousness of those writers to the nature of the 
problem with which they had to deal. The utter 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 161 

triviality of the proofs adduced by Hume for 
miracles which he imagined to be as well estab- 
lished as those of Christ, demonstrates that he 
had never apprehended the very terms of the 
historical problem presented by our Saviour. 
It never dawned upon Baden Powell, that if 
we granted him that Christ had not wrought 
miracles, he would still be confronted by a stu- 
pendous difficulty. His apparatus of natural 
cause might be great ; could he have satisfac- 
torily applied it to the raising of the dead, and 
the feeding of seven or eight thousand persons 
with a few loaves and fishes? The tendency of 
his own argument from experience is to render 
it supremely unlikely that even the disciples of 
Christ should have lied. But we have adduced 
irrefragable proof that Christ Himself deliber- 
ately declared that He had wrought miracles in 
those instances, and it is inconceivable that He 
was mistaken. Will Hume or Baden Powell 
brand the forehead of Christ, that forehead from 
which truth beams as from the moral sun of 
the universe, with that plague-spot of falsehood 
which history and science remove more and 



162 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

more from the brows of erring and ordinary 
mortals ? 

Hume and Powell have departed; but Chris- 
tians ought still to call on unbelievers to do 
what Hume and Powell did not, namely, with 
calmness, with honesty, with deliberation, to 
take up and try to solve the historical diffi- 
culty presented by Christ. After nearly two 
thousand years, those who refuse to have Christ 
as their spiritual King have not succeeded in 
explaining the enigma of His life. There is, 
strictly speaking, no infidel theory of Christ and 
Christianity at present in the field. Let the pur- 
port of this assertion be understood. I should 
not feel justified in making it so broadly, by the 
mere circumstance that rejecters of Christianity 
are not agreed in their explanations of the his- 
torical problem presented by Christ. I should 
attach slight importance to minor discrepancies. 
Philosophers may have refused to yield certain 
particular positions to the Newtonian philosophy 
long after they had arrived at the decisive una- 
nimity of science as to its essential facts. Their 
theorizing on non-essentials would not have 
availed to restore credit to the Ptolemaaan sys- 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 163 

tern of astronomy. But against the Christian 
explanation of the life and character of Christ 
there is no infidel theory, to the very principle 
and essence of which infidels profess agreement. 
The infidel theories of last century have been 
dust under the feet of infidels in the present. 
I doubt whether any skeptical theory has held 
undisputed sway among unbelievers in Christi- 
anity for ten years. Theory after theory has 
emerged; theory after theory has been greeted 
with exultant welcome by men who had made 
up their minds to reject Christ; and theory after 
theory, fluttering aloft for a brief space, like a 
moth in the wind, has been borne away forever. 
The plausible flippancies of Voltaire, and the 
coarse ribaldries of Paine, turning on the hy- 
pothesis that Jesus was an impostor and His dis- 
ciples knaves or fools, had its day; but what 
skeptic of education and intelligence would not 
be ashamed to own that hypothesis now ? 1 The 

1 1 observe that Professor Mansel mentions, in his Essay on 
Miracles, in "Aids to Faith," a book which I did not see until 
most of the proofs of this volume had been corrected, that Bruno 
Bauer has returned to the hypothesis which ascribes the Gospels 
to deliberate fabrication. 



164 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

theory that Christ was a mythical personage, 
magnified and irradiated by the halos of rever- 
ential memory, was once eagerly accepted. Does 
any person now believe in Strauss's Life of Je- 
sus? The Tubingen school, rising like cloudy 
exhalation from the cooling volcano of Hegeli- 
anism, propounded its theory of development ; 
and for many a day its sages were mysteriously 
referred to, in skeptical publications in this coun- 
try, as having at last solved the insoluble prob- 
lem. But the artifice of mysterious reference 
could be at best pro visional ; and no sooner was 
the monstrous hy]3othesis of Tubingen appre- 
hended by the intellect of Britain, than it was 
instinctively discarded. " There is not," said 
Isaac Taylor, a year or two ago, "so far as I 
know, at this time afloat any accepted and avail- 
able non-Christian solution of the enigma regard- 
ing the origin of Christianity ; non-belief at this 
moment has come to a stand-still." The heart 
of the enigma lies in the life and character of 
Christ. I am justified, therefore, in saying that 
infidelity has failed utterly to solve the problem 
of the historical Christ. 

But is it not reasonable to press for a solu- 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 165 

tion? Is it not fair to demand that on such a 
subject there shall be no vagueness, no evasion, 
no indecision ? Tried by any test, Christianity 
deserves the respect of men. The two thousand 
years during which it has been called by that 
name have been years of progress from the im- 
pure to the pure, from the barbarous to the hu- 
mane, from the worse to the better. Christian 
civilization has been of a higher strain than Pa- 
gan civilization. It has given woman her place. 
It has hedged round human life with new sanc- 
tions, putting a stop to infanticide, to torture, 
to gladiatorial shows. It has cast into shadow 
the glory of war as compared with the glory of 
peace. It has abolished caste. It has condemned 
slavery. If the race has outgrown Christianity, 
let it solemnly be put away ; but the dignity of 
humanity requires that it be not shuffled aside 
without being distinctly accounted for as a his- 
torical phenomenon. In the name of God and 
man alike, we may demand clearness on such a 
subject. It is not a case for applause of Chris- 
tian ethics or compliments to the character of 
Christ. We want to know whether what Christ 
said of Himself was true — true when He spake 



166 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

in Judea, true now, true when yon sun shall fade 
like a leaf from heaven — true as a law for life, 
and a hope in death — true with the combined 
and eternal truthfulness of the highest man and 
of present God. It is surely incumbent ujDon 
every one who has come before the public as an 
ethical instructor, and who does not accept Christ 
as sent by God to men, — upon Mr. Carlyle, Mr. 
J. S. Mill, Mr. G. H. Lewes, and others, — to set 
forth explicitly their view of Christ's life and 
character. Let me render very plain what I 
mean. 

Mr. Francis Newman has given to the world a 
theory of the historical Jesus. He makes out 
Christ, as I understand him, to be one of the 
worst men known to history. Mr. Thomas Car- 
lyle, on the other hand, has never referred to 
Christ personally without expressions of rever- 
ence and admiration, while it is known to all who 
are intelligently acquainted with his writings 
that he looks upon the Christian miracles as 
"incredibilities," and does not accept Christ as 
commissioned by God to promulgate a religion 
binding on men throughout all ages. Yet Mr. 
Carlyle has never put on record his estimate of 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 167 

Christianity as a historical phenomenon, or given 
a theory of Christ's life and character. Mr. New- 
man's talents I cannot pretend to estimate highly, 
and his theory of Christ shocks and astounds 
me ; Mr. Carlyle I humbly regard as perhaps the 
most marvellous genius of the century, and with 
much in the ethical spirit of his works I intensely 
sympathize ; but the procedure of Mr. Newman 
in this instance seems to me more worthy of 
approval than Mr. Carlyle's. Mr. Newman saw 
that the rejection of Christianity necessitated a 
decision as to the character of Christ. To reject 
Christianity, and yet regard Christ as a just and 
honest man, he felt to be impossible. He struck 
boldly out, therefore ; he constructed a theory of 
Christ's history ; that theory is inconceivable and 
incredible to all human beings except himself; 
but it is a frank attempt to solve the problem 
before him, and affords a perfect vindication of 
his own consistency. Mr. Carlyle invariably 
mentions Christ as One who stood so far above 
common humanity, that common men might not 
unnaturally bow down to worship him ; yet, when 
we press for an answer to the question how this 
ideal Man got mixed up with such " incredibili- 



168 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

ties" as feeding five thousand on a few loaves 
and fishes, walking on the sea, raising the dead, — 
when we exclaim that the imputation to Him of 
honesty only darkens the enigma of His charac- 
ter if He was not what his disciples believed 
Him, — Mr. Carlyle is dumb. 

It is a bitter insult, on the part of such as he, 
to say, or to leave it to be implied, that the cause 
of their silence is willingness to spare our reli- 
gious sensibilities. Let them be bold to treat us 
as men. Let them make a clean sweep of our 
cherished ineptitudes. The rock of truth may 
be bare, but there are Christians among us who 
can believe it better to have the foot numbed by 
its cold hardness, and torn by its splintered rug- 
gedness, than placed on the softest carpeting of 
falsehood ; nay, whose faith is immovable that its 
surface, barren at first as the rock-foundations of 
the world, will soften in rain and quicken in sun- 
shine, and bear in due time the goodly flower 
and the golden grain. Away with falsehood ; let 
truth be revealed. Only let the work be done 
soberly, avowedly, deliberately. No man has a 
right to call Christ's miracles "incredibilities," 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 169 

until he has clearly and conclusively disproved 
them. 

Meanwhile, I am bound to conclude that the 
testimony of Christ to the reality of His miracles 
is true ; that He jmt in exercise a power beyond 
that of nature, — a power such as God alone, or 
one commissioned by God, could wield ; that, at 
His creative word, "the blind received their 
sight, the lame walked, the lepers were cleansed, 
the deaf heard, and the dead were raised up." 

§ II. — The Good Tidings. 

"To the poor the gospel is preached." This 
formed the second part of that summary of evi- 
dence that He was the Messiah which was sent 
by Christ to John. "Was it also true? Were 
the tidings brought by Christ to the poor really 
good? Were they worthy of being touched 
with the signet-ring of God by miracle, and was 
their excellence so durable that we may rejoice 
in them still ? 

It will be necessary, in answer to this question, 
to state briefly what seems to reveal itself to a 
candid examination as the heart of the message 
delivered by Christ to those who heard Him. 



170 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

He re-proclaimed, first of all, in its integrity, 
the moral law as communicated to Moses, con- 
necting in one universally binding and exhaus- 
tive formula of duty the two precepts of the 
Pentateuch, — Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and 
with all thy might, 1 and, Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself. 2 With radiant clearness, 
with earnestness unspeakable, with simplicity di- 
vine, He preached the great elementary princi- 
ples of morality, — justice, mercy, reverence, and 
truth. These He showed to be the soul of reli- 
gion, the most apt and sublime homage which 
man can render to his God. It was these that 
gave significance to type and importance to cer- 
emonial. Without these the purest profession of 
faith was- to Him hypocrisy, and the most gor- 
geous ritual paint upon a tomb. Their throne 
was to be the heart. External observances, 
except as signs of an inner dominion of godli- 
ness, were worse than nothing. 

He inculcated a pervasive and unbounded 
reverence for God ; a dedication of the life to 
Him ; a preference of His approval to all earthly 

1 Deuteronomy vi. 5. 2 Leviticus xix. 18. 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 171 

things; a fear of His displeasure as the worst 
possible calamity. God himself was to be man's 
model of virtue : " Be ye perfect, even as your 
Father which is in heaven is perfect." 

Deliberate, inflexible submission to God's will 
in all things, and confidence that in all things 
that will must be best, were to regulate man's 
feelings in reference to his earthly condition. 
The just temper of soul Christ declared to be the 
calm of contentment and trust, every sense, 
every faculty, opening like a lily to receive God's 
dew of blessing, God's light of love, but folding 
up in peaceful resignation, never in fretfulness, 
never in despair, when the silver lining of the 
cloud ceased to be visible. 

He hurled Pride forever from that seat of 
honor which it occupied in the ethical system of 
antiquity; and He put in its place the figure 
of Humility, kneeling, with clasped hands and 
bended brow, saying, " Speak, Lord, for thy ser- 
vant heareth." He marked it as worthiest of 
a man not to conquer the striker by returning 
his blow, but first to conquer the fierce impulse 
which burns to return it, and then to conquer 



172 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

him by the look of compassion and the smile of 
forgiveness. 

Both by precept and example, He enjoined an 
orderly and loyal procedure in every civic capa- 
city, rendering unto Csesar the things that are 
Caesar's, bidding the people listen deferentially 
to their teachers, and paying tribute rather than 
create dispute. At the same time, His whole life 
as a man was an infinitely impressive recognition 
of the essential equality of mankind on the basis 
of a common immortality and a common respon- 
sibility. The doctrine of caste in its every modi- 
fication, whether as pride of birth, or of rank, or 
of wealth, or of culture, He tore up by the 
roots ; not by reducing humanity, either at once 
or prospectively, to a dead level, but by piercing 
beneath every artificial distinction of class and 
costume, and recalling human relationships to 
the divinely ordained scale of worth and capa- 
city. " The example of Christ," it has been truly 
said, " stands in marked contrast with the habits 
of all classes of men in His time. He does not 
seem to have thought of men as they stand in 
society grouped in classes, separated or united 
by various customs, nor even as they were sepa- 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 173 

rated and classed by the result of their moral 
conduct. He seems simply and quietly, but 
always, to have beheld them in their original and 
spiritual relations, to each other, to God, and to 
eternity." Neander, who drank, perhaps, more 
deeply into the inner spirit of Christianity than 
any other man since the Apostolic age, dwells 
largely on the all-important fact that Christianity 
annihilates what he calls the " aristocratism " of 
antiquity. That aristocratism was displayed 
mainly in two ways: first, in the division of 
men into esoteric and exoteric circles, — the few 
capable of refinement, and the many doomed to 
perpetual ignorance; second, in the separation 
of political communities into a governing and a 
subject class, — into freemen and slaves. "It 
was not till the word that went forth from the 
carpenter's lowly roof had been published by 
fishermen and tentmakers, that these aristocratic 
notions of the ancient world could be over- 
thrown." All that has ever been said in elo- 
quence or in song of the majesty of man, as 
such, dwindles into insignificance when placed in 
comparison with its practical proclamation in the 
spectacle of Jesus Christ choosing as His disciples 



174 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

the fisherman and the publican, wandering home- 
less among the green hills of Judea, and having 
as His audience the multitude. " The one occa- 
sion on which Christ marked His sense of the 
fact that He was conferring an honor, was when 
He went to break bread with a rich man; the 
one man of whom He spoke in terms of slight- 
ing contempt was a king. 

Nor did the people of Judea, it is worthy of 
remark, show themselves altogether unworthy of 
the honor done them by the Saviour. It is a 
fact, historically beyond doubt, that the common- 
alty were His friends and defenders. " The com- 
mon people heard Him gladly." "Not on the 
feast day, lest there be an uproar among the 
people." "They sought to take Him, but they 
feared the multitude." Let this fact not be dis- 
guised. Let it be mentioned to the everlasting 
honor of the multitude; to the silencing forever, 
in all Christian countries, of those Sadducees 
who find in the raiment of culture more than 
in the soul and spirit of a man; to the refuta- 
tion of those Pagan theorists who would say to 
the wave of moral, of social, of intellectual, of 
political advancement, Hitherto shalt thou come 



TO CHBISTIAmTY. 175 

and no further. The people did not desert 
Christ. A venal rabble, the offscourings of Je- 
rusalem, were sent by the rulers and priests to 
arrest Jesus under cloud of night, when "the 
people " who had cried hail to Him that cometh 
in the name of the Lord were silent in their 
chambers after eating the Passover. In the light 
of day they dared not have done it. A body- 
guard of poor men surrounded the Poor Man 
of Galilee. True, the people did not understand 
Him. True, neither they nor His disciples could 
watch for Him one hour. True, when the con- 
spirators were hurrying through His mock-trial, 
they were asleep. True, their hopes may have 
died in the shadow that veiled the sun over His 
cross, and they could not tell why He whom they 
would so gladly have forced to be a king should 
hang upon a tree. So it has ever been. The 
people in all ages are weak, liable to be misled, 
swayed by impulse ; but for deliberate wicked- 
ness, for purposeful malice, you must look be- 
neath the hood of the priest, the robe of the 
rich man, or the academic stole of the Sadducee ; 
the multitude always means nobly, and its heart, 
well struck, responds to the true and the right. 



176 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

Christ spoke to the people plainly, glowingly, 
kindly, popularly ; and all the wiles of Scribe or 
Pharisee could not blind them to the fact that 
God was with Him. When the resurrection 
morn had dispelled the gloom of Calvary, and 
the Spirit of Christ descended at Pentecost, there 
were thousands of poor men ready to form the 
Christian Church of Jerusalem. With a literal- 
ness and an emphasis of meaning which we 
habitually fail to recognize, Christ could say of 
His teaching, " Unto the poor the gospel is 
preached." 

While thus simple, broad, and practical in the 
grand features of His doctrine, Christ opened 
up wells of spiritual truth to which the sound- 
ing-line of antiquity never reached — depths of 
ethical meaning into which, after eighteen hun- 
dred years, we can but faintly look. He revealed 
to mankind the infinite of love working mysteri- 
ously through suffering. "I suppose," says Ar- 
cher Butler, " it may be said with truth, that if 
any man were to be asked what it is that charac- 
terizes Christianity as a practical system distin- 
guish ably from all that preceded it, or from all 
that have followed without imitating it, he might 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 177 

state it correctly enough in two words, love and 
sorrow : the blessedness of mutual affection, and 
the blessedness of suffering. ... In Christ Him- 
self, who is His own religion alive and in ac- 
tion, they seem, like rainbow colors, evermore 
blended and lost in each other: He is the im- 
mortal image of both ; love and pain are the 
footprints by which we trace Him from page to 
page. And who shall say ichich was foremost 
on Calvary ? Love drew the godhead of Christ 
from its throne ; sorrow, sanctifying sorrow, lifted 
the manhood into meetness to share it." 

Jesus Christ, then, stands before us in the 
evangelical narratives as first of all and always, 
from the baptism of water to the baptism of 
anguish, the Divine Moralist. 

It appears, in the next place, that Christ re- 
quired belief in Himself as the Messiah of God, 
and distinctly stated this as the condition of sal- 
vation. He called upon all, without distinction 
or exception, to come unto Him, to believe in 
Him, and to accept at His hand the gift of peace 
and rest. He was announced as the Jesus who 
was to save His people from their sins; and it 
becomes manifest in His teaching that a special 
12 



178 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

significance attaches to His death in connection 
with the remission of sins. He said that He laid 
down His life for His friends. He said that He 
gave His life " a ransom for many," these words 
being as literal a translation of the Greek words, 
Utqov dvTl ttoIXuv, as can be rendered. Such ex- 
pressions must indicate more than a mere moral 
lesson. 

Besides desciibing Himself as the Son of man, 
Christ called Himself the Son of God, alleged 
His pre-existence, and declared Himself one with 
the Father. And in addition to Himself and 
the Father, He spake of another Existence, the 
Spirit of truth, the Holy Ghost. To speak a 
word against the Holy Ghost He declared to 
be the worst of all blasphemies, the unpar- 
donable sin. There thus dawns from the evan- 
gelic page, as part of the revelation made 
by Christ, the mysterious and sublime truth, 
vaguely guessed at in the most venerable of 
false religions, dimly surmised by the most 
thoughtful sages of antiquity, that in the unity 
of the Godhead there is a tri-unity, that the Di- 
vine Elohim who created all worlds is Father, 
Son, and Holy Ghost. The material universe, 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 179 

the soul of man, the purpose and plan of infinite 
wisdom and mercy by which man is redeemed, 
are the work of Three in One. There is ever 
tri-unity of operation, though the result is the 
flawless unity of Divine perfection ; as in that 
ancient statue, so harmonious in its complete- 
ness that it seemed designed and executed by 
one, yet known to have been the work of three. 

Into fellowship, friendship, oneness with this 
God, Jesus Christ proclaimed Himself the way ? 
and called upon all men to fulfil the end of their 
being, and to glorify God, by consciously devot- 
ing themselves to Him in time, and enjoying 
Him in sinless felicity throughout eternity. Of 
the mode in which Christ mediates this union 
between God and man, He said little beyond 
declaring the fact. He left it to His apostles to 
develop in detail the Christian doctrine of atone- 
ment. But He unquestionably associated union 
with God with the remission of sins through His 
death, on the one hand, and with His taking 
upon Him the part of His people and receiving 
them into Himself, on the other. The soul of 
the good tidings, therefore, which He brought, 
was that man, feeling himself paralyzed through 



180 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

all his faculties by sin, might in Him rise from 
the grave of condemnation, attain to moral 
wholeness, resume the normal condition of his 
nature, and realize a humanity strong by experi- 
ence, crucified with Christ, tried and perfected 
by suffering, victorious over sin and death, more 
illustrious in itself, and more surely confirmed in 
God's favor, than if it had never fallen. What- 
ever Christ as the Redeemer of mankind won, 
whatever was communicable of the fruits of 
His triumph over principalities and powers, was 
shared with His people : " The glory which Thou 
gavest me I have given them ; that they may be 
one, even as we are one : I in them and Thou 
in me, that they may be made perfect in one." 
Thus does "the son of the carpenter" lead us 
on, until we are encircled with the very glories 
of Godhead. 

I shall conclude this brief summary of the 
good tidings preached by Christ to the poor, by 
placing in contrast two passages from two emi- 
nent writers, — the one an admirer of classic an- 
tiquity, and a despiser of the simplicity that is 
in Christ ; the other a Christian minister. It is * 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 181 

thus Gibbon sets before us the best antiquity 
could affirm touching the future of humanity : — 
" The writings of Cicero represent, in the most 
lively colors, the ignorance, the errors, and the 
uncertainty of the ancient philosophers with 
regard to the immortality of the soul. When 
they are desirous of arming their disciples against 
the fear of death, they inculcate, as an obvious, 
though melancholy position, that the fatal stroke 
of our dissolution releases us from the calamities 
of life, and that those can no longer suffer who 
no longer exist. Yet there were a few sages of 
Greece and Rome who had conceived a more 
exalted and, in some respects, a juster idea of 
human nature, though it must be confessed that, 
in the sublime inquiry, their reason had been 
often guided by their imagination, and that their 
imagination had been prompted by their vanity. 
When they viewed with complacency the extent 
of their own mental powers, when they exercised 
the various faculties of memory, of fancy, and of 
judgment in the most profound speculations, or 
the most important labors, and when they re- 
flected on the desire of fame, which transported 
them into future ages, far beyond the bounds of 



182 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

death and of the grave, they were unwilling to 
confound themselves with the beasts of the field, 
or to suppose that a being, for whose dignity 
they entertained the most sincere admiration, 
could be limited to a spot of earth, and to a 
few years of duration. With this favorable pre- 
possession, they summoned to their aid the sci- 
ence, or rather the language, of metaphysics. 
They soon discovered that, as none of the prop- 
erties of matter will apply to the operations of 
the mind, the human soul must, consequently, be 
a substance distinct from the body, pure, simple, 
and spiritual, incapable of dissolution, and sus- 
ceptible of a much higher degree of virtue and 
haj)piness after the release from its corporeal 
prison. From these specious and noble princi- 
ples the philosophers who trod in the footsteps 
of Plato deduced a very unjustifiable conclusion, 
since they asserted, not only the future immor- 
tality, but the past eternity of the human soul, 
which they were too apt to consider as a portion 
of the infinite and self-existing S])irit which per- 
vades and sustains the universe. A doctrine thus 
removed beyond the senses and the experience 
of mankind might serve to amuse the leisure of 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 183 

a philosophic mind, or, in the silence of solitude, 
it might sometimes impart a ray of comfort to 
desponding virtue ; but the faint impression 
which had been received in the schools was 
soon obliterated by the commerce and business 
of active life. We are sufficiently acquainted 
with the eminent persons who nourished in the 
age of Cicero and of the first Caesars, with their 
actions, their characters, and their motives, to 
be assured that their conduct in this life was 
never regulated by any serious conviction of 
the rewards or punishments of a future state. 
At the bar and in the senate of Rome, the 
ablest orators were not apprehensive of giving 
offence to their hearers by exposing that doc- 
trine as an idle and extravagant opinion, which 
was rejected with contempt by every man of a 

liberal education and understanding The 

most sublime efforts of philosophy can extend 
no further than feebly to point out the desire, the 
hope, or, at most, the probability, of a future state." 
And this is the echo which a Christian min- 
ister in the nineteenth century gives of that 
preaching which Jesus of Nazareth addressed 
to the poor: — 



184 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

"His word is assurance ample and sufficient, 
who came from the bosom of God to tell us the 
wondrous secret of our spiritual and bodily im- 
mortality. But this once believed, who can 
believe it, and not acknowledge that it alters 
the whole complexion of his existence ; that he 
has sprung with one bound from dust to angels; 
that he stands on the great platform of immortal 
natures, can see below him the whole universe, 
above him nothing but his God ? Shall we not 
then awake, and know ourselves the immortals 
that we are? This world is but the womb of 
eternity. The Father, who has regenerated, has 
regenerated that He may immortalize. Sooner 
shall He yield His heavenly throne than hold it 
and forsake us; sooner shall God be no longer 
God than * the children of God ' fail to be ' the 
children of the resurrection.' Behold ! we stand 
alone in creation ; earth, sea, and sky, can show 
nothing so awful as we are ! The rooted hills 
shall flee before the fiery glance of the Almighty 
Judge ; the mountains shall become dust, the 
ocean a vapor; the very stars of heaven shall 
fade and fall as the fig-tree casts her untimely 
fruit! yea, c heaven and earth shall pass away;' 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 185 

but the humblest, poorest, lowliest among us is 
born for undying life. Amid all the terrors of 
dissolving nature, the band of immortals shall 
stand before their Judge. He has made you to 
be sharers of His own eternity ; the most incom- 
prehensible of His attributes is permitted in its 
measure to be yours. Alone in a world of weak 
and fading forms, with all perishable, even to the 
inmost folds of the fleshly garment that invests 
you, — with the very beauty of nature dependent 
on its revolutions, its order the order of success- 
ive evanescence, its constancy the constancy of 
change, — amid all this mournful scenery of 
death, you alone are deathless. 

"In the lapse of millions of ages hence, for 
aught we can tell, it may be the purpose of God 
that all this outward visible universe shall grad- 
ually give place to some new creation ; that 
other planets shall circle other suns; that un- 
heard-of forms of animated existence shall crowd 
all the chambers of the sensitive universe with 
forms of life unlike all that we can dream ; that 
in slow progression the immense cycle of our 
present system of nature shall at length expire ; 
— but even then no decay shall dare to touch 



186 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

the universe of souls. Even then there shall be 
memories in heaven that shall speak of their lit- 
tle speck of earthly existence as a well-remem- 
bered history ; yea, that shall anticipate millions 
of even such cycles as this, as not consuming 
even the first glorious minute of the everlasting 
day! For these things ye are born; unto this 
heritage ye are redeemed. Live, then, as citi- 
zens of the immortal empire. Let the impress 
of the eternal country be on your foreheads. 
Let the angels see that you know yourselves 
their fellows. Speak, think, and act, as beseems 
your high ancestry; for your Father is in heaven, 
and the First-born of your brethren is on the 
throne of God. Oh, as you read and hear of 
these things, strain your eyes beyond the walls 
of this dim prison, and catch the unearthly light 
of that spiritual world where the perfected just 
are already awaiting your arrival ! " 1 

The tidings, then, were good ; worthy of that 
characterization which God gave of creation 
when it arose in stainless beauty, obedient to 
the Divine word. Sublime and convincing as 
were the credentials of Christ, in that He caused 

l Archer Butler. 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 187 

the blind to see, the lame to walk, and the dead 
to rise, still more sublime, still more convincing, 
were they, in that they embraced such preaching 
to the poor. 



Having now contemplated, in its comprehen- 
siveness and in its symmetry, the proof of His 
Divine mission presented by Jesus Christ to 
John Baptist, we find it established. The mir- 
acles were genuine ; the tidings were good. 
Shall we still be "offended in Him?" What 
more evidence can we demand that He was, 
that He is, Divine ? If we reject such a revela- 
tion in light and in love, are we sure that it will 
not one day come back upon us in lightning? 
Are we sure that, if we pass heedless by the 
Saviour, thus reasoning with us in time, we shall 
not, while our immortality endures, bear the 
weight of an unutterable woe, the shadow of 
an infinite regret? " The hour is coming, in the 
which all that are in the grave shall hear his 
voice, and shall come forth ; they that have 
done good, unto the resurrection of life ; and 
they that have done evil, unto the resurrection 



188 TESTIMONY OF CHRIST TO CHRISTIANITY 

of damnation." For my own part, I must con- 
clude that Christ's testimony was satisfactory; 
that upon that testimony I am justified by rea- 
son and approved by conscience in risking my 
soul's well-being in time and in eternity; that 
He was the Messiah of God ; and that whatso- 
ever He said was true and authoritative. 



CHAPTER X. 

THE SCOPE OF THE TESTIMONY. 

The testimony of Christ had reference prima- 
rily to the works which He wrought, and to the 
gospel which He proclaimed. But its bearing 
cannot be confined within these limits. From 
the words of Divine wisdom which He spoke 
to the messengers of John radiates light, pene- 
trating beyond Calvary into the future, and send- 
ing a piercing beam far into the past. It will be 
in consistence with the object of these pages to 
consider briefly the scope of His testimony. 

Christ announced to His disciples, as we have 
seen, that He was to die. He coupled this inti- 
mation with another of a strange and momentous 
character, namely, that He would rise again. In 
accordance with His own words, He went to 
death. Every statement He had made proved 
true. By exerting a power omnipotent to con- 
trol the laws and processes of nature, He had 



190 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

removed the antecedent improbability against 
His breaking the bonds of death if He chose 
not to be held "durably in their grasp. When, 
therefore, we find every one of the Evangelists 
affirming that He appeared in life after His cru- 
cifixion, and learn from Paul that He was seen 
by more than five hundred persons at once, we 
are reasonably prepared to credit their allega- 
tions. The testimony of Christ and the testi- 
mony of the disciples combine to certify the 
cardinal fact of the resurrection. That either 
of these testimonies could have been false was 
impossible ; as witnessed by both, the resurrec- 
tion of Jesus Christ stands forth as the best- 
attested fact in the history of the world. 

Again, this Jesus, whose words were Divine, 
and in whose hand gleamed visibly the sceptre 
of the creating God, deliberately commissioned 
His disciples to witness for Him, commanded 
them to teach all nations concerning Him, and 
promised His Spirit to bring all things to their 
remembrance, whatsoever He had said unto 
them. This is a simple fact, historically re- 
corded in the unequivocal language of the 
Evangelists. When we are satisfied of its cor- 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 191 

rectness, must we not regard the accounts we 
possess of Christ's ministry, by His disciples and 
the companions of His disciples, with a venera- 
tion not accorded to ordinary writings ? If the 
promise of Christ is to us a guarantee of abso- 
lute certitude, we know its guardianship to be 
extended over that which just criticism ascer- 
tains to be the £Tew Testament in which His 
Church received the record of His life and the 
statement of His doctrine from His earliest fol- 
lowers. Into the manner of inspiration it is use- 
less, perhaps unlawful, to pry; it has seemed good 
to the Divine wisdom to veil it in mystery. Of 
two things only may we be perfectly assured ; of 
the first by faith in Christ's declaration, of the 
second by an inspection of the books in which 
is contained the revelation of Christianity : that 
Christianity has been authentically and authori- 
tatively transmitted to us; and that the char- 
acters and capacities of Christ's witnesses, em- 
ployed in the work of transmission, were not 
overpowered and obliterated, but preserved and 
used. Had the individuality and the complete 
manhood of the writers of the New Testament 
not been preserved, it would have been impossi- 



192 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

ble to construct a historical proof that Christ 
miraculously suspended the laws of nature. If 
the Gospels had exhibited evidence that their 
authors were in a non-natural state of mind, 
the narrative of particular fact which they con- 
tain must necessarily have lain under suspicion. 
Had they revealed, even, that poetic imagination 
which gives form to bodiless thought, and turns 
the white ray of truth into the many-colored 
thread of fancy, the man who sought only the 
naked circumstances of Christ's history could 
not have reposed confidence in their statements. 
But Infinite Wisdom decreed that, whatever the 
evangelic records might be in respect of inspira- 
tion, they should be undeniably as calm, as per- 
spicuous, as plain and unimpassioned, as any his- 
torical documents in the world. The memory 
of honest and competent witnesses, in circum- 
stances where it was impossible for them to be 
deceived, — the mental faculty to which justice 
appeals when a man is tried for his life, — this 
was the instrument chosen by God for trans- 
mitting the words and recording the works of 
Christ. And was not this method infinitely the 
best? It preserves for us the very sayings of 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 193 

Christ. It photographs Jesus of Nazareth for 
succeeding generations. It transmits the Divine 
utterance; it chronicles the miraculous deed; it 
shows us the child in the Saviour's arms, and the 
tear which bedews His cheek. So far as rever- 
ence permits the exercise of judgment on such a 
matter, we may say that in all this the Spirit of 
inspiration displayed a wisdom infinite in its pro- 
fundity, and a mercy Divine in its condescension. 
As Christ's promise gives us assurance that 
the revelation of God's will made by Himself 
would be authentically transmitted to future 
generations, so His whole relation to the Jew- 
ish religion of His earthly ancestry, and many 
of His express declarations, connect Christianity 
with God's revelation in the past. The Gospel 
history is one consecutive proof that Jesus Christ 
accepted the monotheism of the Hebrews, re- 
vealed in the Old Testament Scriptures, as the 
true religion, adequate, until He appeared, for 
the salvation of the soul and the requirements 
of human civilization. No candid reader of the 
evangelical narrative can fail to perceive that He 
imputed to the sacred writings of the Jews a 
peculiar and exalted character. " Search the 



194 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

Scriptures ; " these words fell from his lips ; they 
referred, beyond possibility of question, to the 
sacred writings of the Jews; and if the New 
Testament contained no other allusion to the 
Hebrew Bible, they would impart to it an un- 
speakable interest and importance for all Chris- 
tians. But, in fact, the religion of the Jews 
was the religion of Christ. To Moses and the 
prophets He appealed as His witnesses and fore- 
runners. He was the son of David, the inher- 
itor of David's royalty, though the diadem of 
Jesse's line encircling His brow shed a purer 
radiance than that of earthly gold, and poured 
its light on a wider circle than the mountains of 
Palestine. The temple from which He expelled 
the buyers and sellers was His Father's house, 
and it was to the God of Abraham He prayed 
when the silence of the Judean hills was broken 
by the voice of His prayer. True, He completed 
the rainbow-arch of Divine revelation. He real- 
ized every prediction, fulfilled every type, and 
illumined every shadow of the old dispensation ; 
and it is not only consistent with, but required 
by His teaching, that the records of the Hebrew 
theocracy should be read in the light of Chris- 



TO CHRISTIANITY. 195 

tian perfection. But it is plain that the testi- 
mony of Christ enables us to discern the as- 
bestos thread of Divine revelation stretching 
through the whole length of human history. 
In one word, the authority of Jesus Christ may 
be irrefragably pleaded for the proposition that 
the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments 
are, in an august and solitary sense, the Word 
of God. As the two wings of the cherubim 
shadowed the mercy-seat, so over Old and 
New Testament are outstretched the wings of 
the mystic Dove, the inspiring Spirit of Jesus. 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 



It is unnecessary to add more than a few 
words. 

Can any rational mind, fairly considering all 
we have seen, continue to doubt that the ap- 
pearance of Jesus Christ in this world is the 
most important, the central, the all-detennining 
fact in human history ? His influence has been 
at the heart of the greatest of civilizations, and, 
judging even by terrestrial analogies, that influ- 
ence must ultimately remould humanity, work- 
ing out the virus of sin and brightening away 
the blight of sorrow. The riddle of the world, 
the existence of evil and of anguish under the 
blue sky of God, may not even thus, to finite 
intelligence, be altogether solved ; but the Chris- 



198 THE TESTIMONY OF CHRIST 

tian solution is surely such a one as thoughtful, 
wise, and reverent men must admit to be infi- 
nitely superior to any which can be offered by 
skepticism. Chaos may not yet in the moral 
world of humanity have given place to cosmos, 
but God has said, "Let there be light," and 
Christ has come, the Light of the world. Long 
ages may yet elapse before His beams have 
reduced the world to order and beauty, and 
clothed a purified humanity with light as with 
a garment. But He has come : the Revealer 
of the snares and chasms that lurk in darkness ; 
the Rebuker of every evil tiling that prowls by 
night ; the Stiller of the storm-winds of passion ; 
the Quickener of all that is wholesome ; the 
Adorner of all that is beautiful; the Reconciler 
of contradictions ; the Harmonizer of discords ; 
the Healer of diseases; the Saviour from sin. 
He has come : the Torch of truth, the Anchor of 
hope, the Pillar of faith, the Rock for strength, 
the Refuge for security, the Fountain for refresh- 
ment, the Vine for gladness, the Rose for beauty, 



TO CBEISTIAN1TT. 199 

the Lamb for tenderness, the Friend for counsel, 
the Brother for love. Jesus Christ has trod the 
world. The trace of the Divine footsteps will 
never be obliterated. And the Divine footsteps 
were the footsteps of a man. The example of 
Christ is such as men can follow. On ! until 
mankind wears His image. On ! towards yon 
summit on which stands, not an angel, not a dis- 
embodied spirit, not an abstract of ideal and un- 
attainable virtues, but the mm Cheist Jesus. 
It is something to have a clear margin left for 
effort, a clear possibility marked for improve- 
ment. When humanity has become like Sis 
humanity we may pause ; we shall then be 
aware that the clouds above our head have 
beamed into the unutterable beauty of heaven, 
and that the lilies of the field have glowed into 
immortal amaranths. May God Almighty hasten 
the consummation, and may we with passionate, 
steady-burning, unquenchable ardor, strive to 
know and to imitate Christ! Let us deliber- 
ately crown Him Lord of all. In practice and 



200 TESTIMONY OF CHRIST TO CHRISTIANITY. 

in speculation, in intellect and in affection, in the 
family circle, in the social throng, in the political 
enterprise, in the inmost recesses of our being, 
in the slightest outgoing of our activity, let Him 
reign perpetually, unreservedly, supremely ! 



THE END. 



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